Checking if a variable is an integer

If you're uncertain of the type of the variable (it could be a string of number characters), say it was a credit card number passed into the params, so it would originally be a string but you want to make sure it doesn't have any letter characters in it, I would use this method:

    def is_number?(obj)
        obj.to_s == obj.to_i.to_s
    end

    is_number? "123fh" # false
    is_number? "12345" # true

@Benny points out an oversight of this method, keep this in mind:

is_number? "01" # false. oops!

If you want to know whether an object is an Integer or something which can meaningfully be converted to an Integer (NOT including things like "hello", which to_i will convert to 0):

result = Integer(obj) rescue false

Use a regular expression on a string:

def is_numeric?(obj) 
   obj.to_s.match(/\A[+-]?\d+?(\.\d+)?\Z/) == nil ? false : true
end

If you want to check if a variable is of certain type, you can simply use kind_of?:

1.kind_of? Integer #true
(1.5).kind_of? Float #true
is_numeric? "545"  #true
is_numeric? "2aa"  #false

You can use the is_a? method

>> 1.is_a? Integer
=> true
>> "[email protected]".is_a? Integer
=> false
>> nil.is_a? Integer
=> false