What does this line of ruby do?

user_5698865 0
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I stumbled upon this line of Ruby in our codebase:

value = value.to_i if value == value.to_i

and I can't understand what it is supposed to do.

If the guard condition is false, it does nothing. If it is true, it's a noop.

What gives?

ruby
2 Answers

This line of code will cast any integer number to the Integer class, so it will replace 2.0 or BigDecimal(2) with 2. This might be useful if you have code later on which cares about the class of value.

Simon_153710

It is a noop in most cases. However, in cases where value doesn't respond to to_i, a NoMethodError will be thrown - I very much doubt that this is intentional, but without more context it's difficult to be more precise.

user_1636400
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