Date parsing issues

Rails
1

Hi,

I’m having problem at the moment trying to parse a date. I’m reading in
2 dates from the view and want to search a DB for records between the 2
dates.

The 2 dates I read are in the format ‘%d.%m.%Y’, e.g. 22.04.2009
The dates in the DB are stored as VARCHAR in the format ‘%Y/%m/%d
%H:%M:%S’

I’ve set the default date in environments.db as follows:
ActiveSupport::CoreExtensions::Time::Conversions::DATE_FORMATS.merge!(
:default => ‘%d.%m.%Y’
)

I’ve tried parsing the 2 dates as follows:
Time.parse(params[:from]).strftime("%Y/%m/%d")

However the result is incorrect for my locale.
If I read in a date ‘12.04.2009’ I would get the following output:
2009/12/04, when what I want is 2009/04/12. It’s getting the day and
month mixed. The Locale on my machine is correct and the timezone in the
environments.db is set to UTC.

2

Thanks Dmitry!
I was getting a little confused with the date formatting and parsing.

3

Declan,

All setting you’ve set affect only date formatting but not parsing.
And unfortunately it seems that there are no clean way to parse
DD.MM.YYYY dates in Ruby. But there is a dirty way:

put it in some initializer

class << Date
alias _parse_without_eu_format _parse
def _parse(str, comp = false)
str = str.to_s
str = “#{$3}-#{$2}-#{$1}” if /(\d{2}).(\d{2}).(\d{4})/ =~ str
_parse_without_eu_format(str, comp)
end
end

class << Date
def try_parse(string, default = nil)
components = ParseDate.parsedate(string)
components.first ? new(*components[0…2]) : default
end
end

then the dates will be parsed correctly

p Date.parse(“22.04.2009”)
p Date.parse(“04/22/2009”)

Dmitry