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views:

591

answers:

4

I want to format a date object so that I can display strings such as "3rd July" or "1st October". I can't find an option in Date.strftime to generate the "rd" and "st". Any one know how to do this?

+6  A: 

Hello, I don't think Ruby has it, but if you have Rails, try this:-

puts 3.ordinalize #=> "3rd"
wai
It's also available in Facets.
Pesto
+1  A: 
created_at.strftime("#{created_at.day.ordinalize} of %m, %y")

Will produce "4th of July, 2009"

Barry Gallagher
I had to add a # in front of the { but this worked a treat Thanks!
xenon
+10  A: 

Unless you're using Rails, add this ordinalize method (code shamelessly lifted from the Rails source) to the Fixnum class

class Fixnum
  def ordinalize
    if (11..13).include?(self % 100)
      "#{self}th"
    else
      case self % 10
        when 1; "#{self}st"
        when 2; "#{self}nd"
        when 3; "#{self}rd"
        else    "#{self}th"
      end
    end
  end
end

Then format your date like this:

> now = Time.now
> puts now.strftime("#{now.day.ordinalize} of %B, %Y")
=> 4th of July, 2009
Lars Haugseth
+5  A: 

I'm going to echo everyone else, but I'll just encourage you to download the activesupport gem, so you can just use it as a library. You don't need all of Rails to use ordinalize.

% gem install activesupport
...
% irb 
irb> require 'rubygems'
#=>  true
irb> require 'activesupport'
#=>  true
irb> 3.ordinalize
#=>  "3rd"
rampion
Good point. You can also get this functionality from the facets (http://facets.rubyforge.org) library - require 'facets' or, for just this method, require 'facets/integer/ordinal'
Greg Campbell