Where is the best place to add methods to the Integer class in Rails?

Question

Where is the best place to add a method to the integer class in Rails? I\'d like to add a to_meters and to_miles methods.

Answer 1

Normally (and logically), integers can't be converted to miles or to meters. It sounds like you may want to create a new class like "Feet" or "inches" that is initialized with an integer, then contains methods like size_in_miles or size_in_meters. For convenience those methods could return decimal or float types, but you might also want to write a miles class or a meters class.

As an alternate method, you might want to create a static method in your new class that would have a signature like this:

Float feetToMiles(integer I)

that you would call

miles = Feet.feetToMiles(5280);

and get miles = 1.0