Postgres, Rails, and Regex's

If you have a column that contains both string and integer values in Postgres, you can limit results to just integer values by using a regular expression:

select * from responses where value ~ '^\d+$'

Pretty cool stuff... In Rails, it's a little tricky to use, but the easiest way I found is to move into a scope

class Response < AR::Base
  scope :integer_values, -> { where("value ~ ?", '^\d+$') }
end

Which you would then use thusly:

Response.integer_values.where("value > 5")