selected problems in rails?

One thing I found out that about rails is that the select_tag is a pain. Why? Because this would not work:

<%= select_tag 'industry', options_from_collection_for_select(@industry_list, "id", "name", @industry) %>

But this would work:

<%= select_tag 'industry', options_from_collection_for_select(@industry_list, "id", "name", @industry.to_i) %>

Well, that's for forgetting that HTTP query parameters are strings!