Question

I am searching through an array of strings looking for a Date:

Is the method I’m using a good way to do it?
OR . . . is there a better alternative.

Perhaps a more “beautiful” way to do it?

    query = {'Hvaða','mánaðardagur','er','í','dag?','Það','er','02.06.2011','hví','spyrðu?'}

    def has_date(query)
        date = nil
        query.each do |q|
            begin
                date = Date.parse(q)
                query.delete(q)
                break
            rescue
            end
       end
       return date
    end

Answer 1

Note that in Ruby we use square brackets [] for array literals (curly braces {} are for Hash literals).

Here is a solution that will find all dates in the array and return them as strings (thanks @steenslag):

require 'date'
arr = ['Hvaða', 'er', '02.06.2011', 'hví', '2011-01-01', '???']
dates = arr.select { |x| Date.parse(x) rescue nil }
dates # => ["02.06.2011", "2011-01-01"]