Is there a full implementation for ISO-8601 date parsing for Ruby

Answer 1

Yes, but unfortunately it's in Ruby 1.9.

require "date"

Date.iso8601("2010-W32-5").strftime
#=> "2010-08-13" 

I don't believe there are any implementations for Ruby 1.8.7 (or at least I couldn't find any). You could either try to upgrade to Ruby 1.9, which is pretty stable as of 1.9.2. Alternatively, you could try to parse the dates yourself.