Question

I need a reliable way to convert formatted date strings into datetime objects so I can save into the database. I’m importing data from an RSS feed and the date strings look like this 10/31/2012 11:59:00 PM, but every once in a while one will come through with no time data, like this: 9/24/2012. Is there a way to convert the string to a datetime object regardless if the time is present or not?

I was using Date.strptime() because Date.parse() wasn’t being reliable enough for me. Here’s what I was using, which will error out when it encounters the date string without the time.

Date.strptime(i.xpath('activedate').text, '%m/%d/%Y %I:%M:%S %p').to_datetime

What would be the best way to handle this?

Answer 1

I recommend chronic:

require 'chronic'

Chronic.parse '10/31/2012 11:59:00 PM'
#=> 2012-10-31 23:59:00 0800
Chronic.parse '9/24/2012'
#=> 2012-09-24 12:00:00 0800