Question

In my Rails app I need to get the dates for the next occurrence of a particular weekday starting from some other date. So basically I need date.next_monday, date.next_wednesday type functions. I don’t think these exist in standard Ruby libraries so I decided to monkey patch the Date class like so:

class Date
  weekdays = [:sunday, :monday, :tuesday, :wednesday, :thursday, :friday, :saturday]
  weekdays.each do |weekday|
    method_name = "next_" + weekday.to_s
    send :define_method, method_name do
      tmp_date = self + 1
      until tmp_date.send((weekday.to_s + "?").to_sym)
        tmp_date = tmp_date + 1
      end
      tmp_date
    end
  end
end

This seems to work fine.
My questions are:

1. Did I not need to do all that? (Is there some way to get next_ that I’m not thinking of?
2. If what I did is necessary, is there a better way to get the weekdays array?

Thanks!

Answer 1

The Date class defines a DAYNAMES constant (as well as a number of other useful constants) that you could use to replace your array.