Question

Apologies if the title is not clear, I’ not really sure how to explain this clearly.

In a Rails app I’m pulling in users’ data from a 3rd party provider’s API. One of the attributes is the user’s birthday.

I am storing the hashed data in my database and, in certain circumstances, need to display the user’s birthday in the view.

The problem is that the birthday is not formatted as a Date. Within the hash, it is in the format mm/dd/yyyy. This means that my usual date scoped formats don’t work on it.

Given that I am extracting the birthday from the hashed data column as follows

<%= @user.hashed_data["info"]["birthday"] %>

what is the best/ most efficient way to handle this so that I can display localized date formats?

Do I need to split on the / symbols, and then recombine the resulting string to a date? Or am I overcomplicating this?

Thanks for any suggestions.

Answer 1

Try:

Date.strptime('01/31/2011', '%m/%d/%Y') 
# => #<Date: 2011-01-31 (4911185/2,0,2299161)>