 <p>Looks like you need conversion from JSON to hash. (See <a href="http://apidock.com/rails/Hash/to_json" rel="nofollow">DOCS</a>). But, when you do <code>to_s</code> the output is not in pure JSON format. So, you may see I'm using <code>gsub</code> to replace <code>=&gt;</code> with <code>:</code></p> <pre><code>require 'json' hash = {"description" =&gt; "test"} =&gt; {"description"=&gt;"test"} str = hash.to_s.gsub("=&gt;", ":") =&gt; "{\"description\":\"test\"}" JSON.parse(str) =&gt; {"description"=&gt;"test"} </code></pre>