Question

I have a Date object

Mon, 03 Dec 2012

and I have a String that contains a day name

"Thursday"

How can I use those two objects to find a new Date object representing the day name in the same week as the original Date object? So for this example, it would be

Thu, 07 Dec 2012

In this scenario, a week goes from Monday to Sunday.

I’m using Rails 3.2.0 and Ruby 1.9.3.

Answer 1

If you can manage to convert “Thursday” to week day 4 — I know you can –, you can get another date like this:

1.9.3p125 :014 > d = Date.parse "Mon, 03 Dec 2012"
 => Mon, 03 Dec 2012 
1.9.3p125 :015 > Date.commercial d.cwyear, d.cweek, 4
 => Thu, 06 Dec 2012 
1.9.3p125 :016 > 

BTW, you can store the map from day name to number in an Array or an Hash, or use I18n.