Question

I am working through Chris Pine’s Ruby book, and I am slightly confused why my code doesn’t quite work.

I have a file called birthdays.txt which has around 10 lines of text which resembles:

Andy Rogers, 1987, 02, 03

etc.

My code as follows:

hash = {}

File.open('birthdays.txt', "r+").each_line do |line|
  name, date = line.chomp.split( /, */, 2 )
  hash[name] = date
end

puts 'whose birthday would you like to know?'

name = gets.chomp
puts hash[name]                                    
puts Time.local(hash[name])

My question is, why does the last line of code, Time.local(hash[name]) produce this output?:

1987-01-01 00:00:00 +0000 

instead of:

1987-02-03 00:00:00 +0000

Answer 1

line = "Andy Rogers, 1987, 02, 03\n"
name, date = line.chomp.split( /, */, 2 ) #split (', ', 2) is less complex.
#(Skipping the hash stuff; it's fine)
p date #=>          "1987, 02, 03"
# Time class can't handle one string, it wants: "1987", "02", "03"
# so: 
year, month, day = date.split(', ')
p Time.local(year, month, day)
# or do it all at once (google "ruby splat operator"):
p Time.local(*date.split(', '))