times filter not working with text about liquid HOT 5 CLOSED

This behaviour is intended (see fce8bcb). I've removed the example from the wiki.

from liquid.

I don't really get why that change was made?
String multiplication is valid in Ruby: http://www.ruby-doc.org/core/classes/String.html#M001126
And I don't see why casting to a number will help you out?

from liquid.

The arithmetic filters were always intended primarily for numbers. I originally implemented them to accomodate strings as well, because I figured "what the heck, ruby provides it for free." The problem is that there's no other way of casting strings to numbers in liquid, and it meant that when you're using e.g. the value of an input field or the result of a {%capture%} tag as the filter argument, there was no way to do actual arithmetic with it.

from liquid.

Ok, understood.

But can I make an suggestion?
{{ 'foo111' | times:4 }} #=> 'foo111foo111foo111foo111'
{{ 'foo111' | to_number | times:4 }} #=> '444'

It's no real problem to me (and I'm no contributor to liquid), but I was just wondering...

from liquid.

Yeah, that was the other alternative that we considered, but ultimately we decided it was more important to make the common case easy than to accomodate the edge case with the same interface. (And as you say, the edge case is still possible with a loop).

One of the nice things about liquid is how extensible it is, so if you want to make your own filters for string manipulation to use in your project, it's easy to do that.

from liquid.