Boolean.parse

So often in Ruby on Rails I find myself needing to convert a variable to a Boolean, and there is no built in way of doing it. So, how about this:

class Boolean
  def self.parse(obj)
    %w(true t 1 y).include?(obj.to_s.downcase.strip)
  end
end

We use this at work and it’s a nice neat way of ensuring non-repetitive code reuse :)