Exploding date string into separate span elements in Ruby

Question

Hi,

I'm looking for the best way to take a datetime string from MySQL, explode it in Ruby and return the month, date, and year in separate elements.

Answer 1

How is the string formatted? You could just convert the datetime string into a datetime object, and call the instance methods.

require 'time'
x = "2009/04/16 19:52:30" #grab your datetime string from the database and assign it

y = DateTime.strptime(x, "%Y/%m/%d %H:%M:%S") #create a new date object

Then a simple y.day() yields:

y.day() = 16

and y.hour():

y.hour() = 19

FYI never actually used Ruby much, so this is what I got out of playing with the console, so hopefully this helps shed some light.

Answer 2

require 'time'
x = "2009/04/16 19:52:30"
begin
  y = Time.parse(x)
  [y.year, y.month, y.day]   # => [2009, 4, 16]
rescue ArgumentError
  puts "cannot parse date: #{x}"
end