Parsing european date format in Ruby/Rails

September 13 2006 rails | tips

Parsing european date format in Ruby/Rails

So you have date in european format DD.MM.YYYY. that you want to parse in ruby? Nothing easier, change parsedate method in ParseDate stdlib.

require ('parsedate')
module ParseDate
  class << self
    alias_method :old_parsedate, :parsedate unless
        method_defined?(:old_parsedate)
  end

  def self.parsedate(str)
    match = /(\d{1,2})\.(\d{1,2})\.(\d{2,4})\.?/.match(str)
    return ParseDate.old_parsedate(str) unless match
    [match[3].to_i, match[2].to_i, match[1].to_i, 
     nil, nil, nil, nil, nil] 
  end
end

On Rails, you can include it in environment.rb file with require ('parsedate_patches.rb').

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6 comments

# On February 02, 2007 at 07:02 AM, Mike McKay said:
Where do you save the above file? In lib?
# On February 02, 2007 at 08:02 AM, bmihelac said:
Yes lib folder would be right place to put file.
# On February 16, 2007 at 14:02 PM, Peter said:
As none of the strategies I found did fully satisfy me, I have now made a plugin that does format the date, selectively for specific attributes, when
1. pre-filling an input form (from a database entry or some default),
2. parsing the input form from a POST action
3. (optionally) presenting it in regular output
All one has to do is mention the respective attributes in the model, like dt_datum_parse :date_field1, :date_field2, ...
dt_datum_view :date_field1, :date_field2, ...
It provides the "german" date (like "28.02.2007") and works with postgresQL - which is what I need. (It does currently not support "datetime" fields and such.) You're welcome to try it out, optimize, enhance it... http://80.237.237.126/download/rails-plugins/dt_datum-1.0.tar.gz PMc
# On May 13, 2007 at 13:05 PM, dimi3 said:
It's easier to just write a method like: def format_date(value) sprintf value.day.to_s + '.' + value.month.to_s + '.' + value.year.to_s end Or whatever you'd like.
# On April 22, 2008 at 17:04 PM, anton@kopylov.net said:

“I find much easy way: d = Date.strptime(‘07.02.2008’, ‘%d.%m.%Y’) “
# On June 15, 2008 at 01:06 AM, Elmer Davis said:

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