CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsrubyruby-on-rails-3rubygems
Mohamed El Mahallawy
Mohamed El Mahallawy

Reputation: 921

Can't convert from Fixnum into String

I am using the rmeetup gem to grab information from the meetup group. When I try to pull information from the results, all works except time and I receive a 'can't convert Fixnum into String'

My code: 

   <% RMeetup::Client.api_key = "APICODE" 
    results = RMeetup::Client.fetch(:open_events, { topic: "business", city: "syracuse", state: "ny"}) %>
    <%= results.count %><br/>
    <%= results.each do |result| %>
        <%= result.name %> 
        <%= result.id %>
        <%= result.waitlist_count %>
        <%= result.utc_offset %>
        <%= result.created %>
        <%= result.time.to_s %>

        <hr/

    <% end %>

What is strange is that the .id, .waitlist_count, .utf_offset, .created all work and all are numbers, but .time wont work and will not allow to me convert to string.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1854

Answers (1)

Charles Caldwell
Charles Caldwell

Reputation: 17169

Almost every object, going all the way up to Object, contains a to_s method on it.

Object.new.to_s #=> "#<Object:0x1668fa8>"

This means that your problem isn't in the to_s method that is getting called by <%= ... %>.

Looking at the event.rb file in the rmeetup gem, you'll notice:

self.time = DateTime.parse(event['time'])

This means that the instance variable you are calling with result.time is of the type DateTime. Also note that it is getting set by using DateTime.parse which takes a string. So what happens when you pass a Fixnum to DateTime.parse?

DateTime.parse(42) #=> 'no implicit conversation of Fixnum into String'

According to the MeetUp API, the time is returned as:

UTC start time of the event, in milliseconds since the epoch

The original RMeetup gem was last updated 5 years ago. Are you using a more recent fork? If not, it could be that the gem has simply broken as new APIs are released by MeetUp. I would suggest either finding a more up-to-date gem for accessing the MeetUp API or fork the gem and make your own alterations.

Upvotes: 1

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