Gsub on a Fixnum? undefined method `gsub' for 55:Fixnum

Question

With the following function, I go to a site, crawl some information, am returned some JSON, and put it into the @price instance variable.

The JSON that is returned to me is a number, but if the number is greater than 1000, then the number will contain a comma, so I gsub it out.

  def iteminfo(id)
    url = "http://services.runescape.com/m=itemdb_rs/api/catalogue/detail.json?item=#{id}"
    page = Nokogiri::HTML(open(url))
    info = JSON.parse(page.text)
    namefinder =  info['item']['name']
    pricefinder = info['item']['current']['price']
    name = namefinder
    @price = pricefinder.gsub(',', '').to_i
  end

I've already tried this:

if pricefinder.to_i > 1000
  @price = pricefinder.gsub(',', '').to_i
else
  @price = pricefinder.to_i
end

which gets rid of the error, but messes up the math that is performed on @price How can I fix this?

Answer 1

It appears you need to accommodate getting either a number or a string. There a number of ways to handle it, but one would be:

@price = pricefinder.to_s.gsub(',', '').to_i

Answer 2

The error states that you're trying to call the method gsub on an object of type Fixnum (This tells me that you're dealing with strings and with numbers at the same time).

Something like this might work:

pricefinder.to_s.gsub(',', '').to_i