Octal to decimal

When I saw it I was like wouldn’t it trim the 0 anyways? Then I ran it and it came out as a weird number, then I stuck a zero on the other password, and it said this cannot be an octal number. Then I came to the faq, and saw your post :D. A password should really be a string in this example

I was curious as to why the number is automatically converted to an octal in Ruby. Here is an interesting link where this issue is discussed, the author considers this to be a weakness in Ruby: http://wordaligned.org/articles/octal-literals

And I agree with Joshua, the password should be a string.

Integer literals— constants such as 3, 42, 1024, etc.— are interpreted specially when they start with a 0 (zero). If the number starts with 0x or 0X, it is interpreted to be a hexadecimal number consisting of hex digits 0-9A-F. if it begins with 0b, it is interpreted to by a binary number consisting of binary digits 0 and 1. If it begins with 0 without any subsequent letter, it is interpreted as an octal constant consisting of octal digits 0-7.

    x = [ 0377, 0b11111111, 0xff, 017, 0b1111, 0x0f ] 
    x.each { |n| print "#{n} "}

results in “255 255 255 15 15 15 “

This is common in many programming languages and is, in fact, mandated by many language standards bodies. The origins are likely with AT&T’s early C specification, from which so many languages borrowed a page or more.

Awesome. For a beginner like me it’s nice when someone explains stuff like that that’s not directly related to the answer but still makes you wonder. Thanks!

Good point!

I wanted to also express my appreciation for this observation as a beginner! These kinds of little side issues are what usually mess me up the most.