Question

I am faced with an issue in Ruby on Rails. I am looking to convert a string of format Tue, 10 Aug 2010 01:20:19 -0400 (EDT) to a date object.

Is there anyway i could do this.

Here is what I’ve looked and tried at the following with no luck:

1. Date.strptime(updated,"%a, %d %m %Y %H:%M:%S %Z")
2. Chronic Parser
3. Ruby: convert string to date
4. Parsing date from text using Ruby

Please help me out with this.

Answer 1

What is wrong with Date.parse method?

str = "Tue, 10 Aug 2010 01:20:19 -0400 (EDT)"
date = Date.parse str
=> #<Date: 4910837/2,0,2299161>
puts date
2010-08-10

It seems to work.

The only problem here is time zone. If you want date in UTC time zone, then it is better to use Time object, suppose we have string:

str = "Tue, 10 Aug 2010 01:20:19 +0400"
puts Date.parse str
2010-08-10
puts Date.parse(Time.parse(str).utc.to_s)
2010-08-09

I couldn’t find simpler method to convert Time to Date.