How to read an hstore as a hash (instead of a string)?

[eugenemiretsky]

Reading from an HStore returns a string, for example:
user.date["friends"] = [123,234]
user.save
user.date["friends"]
=> "[123, 234]"

Is it possible to make it return the appropriate data type?

[diogob]

Actually no, the hstore serializer records all the values as strings. You would have to handle serializing, deserializing and type coercion in your code.

[joaomilho]

And, BTW, the value you're using is supposed to be an array and not a hash.