Ruby turn string into symbol

There are a number of ways to do this:

If your string has no spaces, you can simply to this:

"medium".to_sym => :medium

If your string has spaces, you should do this:

"medium thing".gsub(/\s+/,"_").downcase.to_sym => :medium_thing

Or if you are using Rails:

"medium thing".parameterize.underscore.to_sym => :medium_thing

References: Convert string to symbol-able in ruby

You can convert a string to symbol with this:

string = "something"
symbol = :"#{string}"