Question

I am parsing some data and then trying to save it into a database within Rails.

I parsed some text into a string “23/May/2012” and my goal now is to figure out how to turn that string into a date that I can save to the database via ActiveRecord.

Would the approach to this be different if I am using straight Ruby in IRB vs. trying to store it in a Rails DB?

Answer 1

Try this:

require 'date'

row.date = Date.parse( "23/May/2012" )
#=> #<Date: 2012-05-23 ((2456071j,0s,0n),+0s,2299161j)>

This assumes your date column is a Date type. For DateTime use DateTime.parse and Time.parse for Time.

This should work in both your app and IRB.