Error with converting a string negative number to an integer when importing in Ruby

Question

My Ruby environment is: Ruby 2.3.1 and Rails 5.0.0.1.

I'm trying to convert a negative string number in an integer, for instance:

When I try to turn this "-2000" in the irb terminal, I got the result expected -2000

But I'm trying to convert this when I import this data from a CSV file.

I'm using the following information:

CSV file

345,-2000
345,120000

Code file

CSV.foreach("file.csv") do |row|
  p [row[0], row[1]]
  p row[1].to_i
  p row[1].force_encoding('UTF-8').to_i
  p Integer(row[1])
  p Integer(row[1].force_encoding('UTF-8'))
end

I got that:

["345", "-2000"]
0
0
'Integer': invalid value for Integer(): "\xC2\xAD2000" (ArgumentError)
'Integer': invalid value for Integer(): "\xC2\xAD2000" (ArgumentError)

Using the Integer(), I discovered that the - sign is represented by "\xC2\xAD".

In summary, the to_i method is converting "\xC2\xAD2000" to 0 and the Integer() is trigging an error.

Could someone help with that?

Thanks for your attention.

Where did this data come from and/or what is the CSV encoded as? This tutorial might help - justinweiss.com/articles/… — user419017
– user419017, Commented Nov 23, 2016 at 16:10
@DamienRoche this is a simple file with CSV extension. I did not encode this file. I just use the CSV class to turn each row in a line in an array and. I will see the tutorial. Thanks. — Kelvin Matheus
– Kelvin Matheus, Commented Nov 23, 2016 at 16:19
force_encoding should only be used in very specific cases; and almost never when opening a file (unless you know there's specific text that doesn't conform to the overall encoding of the file). Instead you should specify the encoding when opening the CSV; see the doc. — Kelvin
– Kelvin, Commented Nov 23, 2016 at 16:34

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 12:13:46Z

1

It looks like you actually have two characters here..

\xC2: SublimeText keeps inserting \xc2 characters
\xAD: (soft-hyphen) http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/00ad/index.htm

Personally, I would replace this combination of characters with an actual hyphen and then convert to integer:

CSV.foreach("file.csv") do |row|
  p row[1].sub("\xC2\xAD", '-').to_i
end

That, or clean up the source file. Unsure of how you are generating it, but worth looking into.

edited May 23, 2017 at 12:13

CommunityBot

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answered Nov 23, 2016 at 16:25

user419017

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