Rails 3. Why do decimal value strings have values ​​such as # <BigDecimal: 5003750, '0.1E2', 9 (18) >>?

Question

Why are strings with decimal values ​​values ​​like #> instead of the usual decimal?

I have a cost column and I get weird values. This is normal? If so, why?

Answer 1

This is exactly how Ruby displays BigDecimal objects by default. Not sure why they chose such an ugly format, but hey - maybe some additional information might be useful.

In any case, you can still use them the way you expect - this is just a bit of a weird display. If you want to print BigDecimal in a more normal format, first call to_s , or use puts , which calls to_s for you.

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

Rails automatically returns the decimal value of "row" to the Ruby object that most resembles it. In this case, BigDecimal.

To print this in a good way, you can use "to_s", for example:

 puts my_decimal.to_s => "3000000000000000000.0" 

which should print it better than the ugly version with the class name that you see now.