Ruby parse date string

date, date-format, date-parsing, ruby

Solution

`Date.parse` is already mentioned.

I prefer `Date.strptime`. This methods is a reverse strftime.

`Date.parse` is a (maybe good) guess, with `Date.strptime` you can parse each date, when you know which format you expect.

Example:

require 'date'
puts  Date.strptime('December 09, 2011', '%B %d, %Y')

Or if you have another format where `Date.parse` fails:

require 'date'
puts Date.strptime("28-May-10", "%d-%b-%y") #2010-05-28

Problem

I need to parse a date string mentioned below into a `Date` object. Is there a built in function in Ruby that would parse something like the string `"December 09, 2011"` to a `Date` of 2011-12-09?

Original source

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