Question

Is it possible to parse a localized DateTime string back to a proper DateTime using native
Ruby or Rails methods?

I looked in i18n where I would expect this to be, since it holds the formats and locale, but I couldn’t find it.

I have a String: "za 18 mei 18:05" which is Dutch (:nl), in English it would be "Sa 18 May 6:15PM".The dateformat is: "%a %d %b %H:%M". I want the String to parse back to 2012-05-08T18:12:00+01:00.

Is there a possible way to get a DateTime from this? I have a large locale file for my Dutch translations and I can’t imagine I cannot use this to parse a format back to db format

Answer 1

You will need to manipulate your date strings a little bit, because they are not in English.

Try this:

nl = "vri 18 mei 18:05"
dt = DateTime.strptime(nl.gsub(/vri|mei/, 'vri' => 'Fri', 'mei' => 'May'), "%a %d %b %H:%S")

That is an example approach on how to replace ‘za’ with ‘Sat’ and ‘mei’ with ‘May’ before sending the string to strptime. You probably need to come up with a more elegant approach on replacing your original strings (writing a helper for example).

Using the delocalize gem

Alternatively, maybe you can try the gem delocalize:

I18n.locale = :nl
Delocalize::LocalizedDateTimeParser.parse("Vri 18 mei 18:02", DateTime)

Make sure that you have the correct “nl.yml” in your config/locales folder.
You can grab from here: https://github.com/svenfuchs/rails-i18n/blob/master/rails/locale/nl.yml