How do I keep my rails integer from being converted to binary?

Question

As you may be able to see in the image, I have a User model and @user.zip is stored as an integer for validation purposes (ie, so only digits are stored, etc.). I was troubleshooting an error when I discovered that my sample zip code (00100) was automatically being converted to binary, and ending up as the number 64.

Any ideas on how to keep this from happening? I am new to Rails, and it took me a few hours to figure out the cause of this error, as you might imagine :)

I can't imagine any other information would be helpful here, but please inform me if otherwise.

Answer 1

This is not binary, this is octal.

In Ruby, any number starting with 0 will be treated as an octal number. You should check the Ruby number literals to learn more about this, here's a quote:

You can use a special prefix to write numbers in decimal, hexadecimal, octal or binary formats. For decimal numbers use a prefix of 0d, for hexadecimal numbers use a prefix of 0x, for octal numbers use a prefix of 0 or 0o, for binary numbers use a prefix of 0b. The alphabetic component of the number is not case-sensitive.

For your case, you should not store zipcodes as numbers. Not only in the database, but even as variables don't treat them as numeric values. Instead, store and treat them as strings.