Decimals and commas when entering a number into a Ruby on Rails form

Question

What\'s the best Ruby/Rails way to allow users to use decimals or commas when entering a number into a form? In other words, I would like the user be able to enter 2,000.99

Answer 1

I was unable to implement the earlier def price=(price) virtual attribute suggestion because the method seems to call itself recursively.

I ended up removing the comma from the attributes hash, since as you suspect ActiveRecord seems to truncate input with commas that gets slotted into DECIMAL fields.

In my model:

before_validation :remove_comma

def remove_comma
  @attributes["current_balance"].gsub!(',', '')  # current_balance here corresponds to the text field input in the form view

  logger.debug "WAS COMMA REMOVED? ==> #{self.current_balance}"
end