The Ruby Way: Solutions and Techniques in Ruby Programming, Second Edition

7.20. Retrieving a Date/Time Value from a String

A date and time can be formatted as a string in many different ways because of abbreviations, varying punctuation, different orderings, and so on. Because of the various ways of formatting, writing code to decipher such a character string can be daunting. Consider these examples:

s1 = "9/13/98 2:15am"
s2 = "1961-05-31"
s3 = "11 July 1924"
s4 = "April 17, 1929"
s5 = "20 July 1969 16:17 EDT"  # That's one small step...
s6 = "Mon Nov 13 2000"
s7 = "August 24, 79"           # Destruction of Pompeii
s8 = "8/24/79"

Fortunately, much of the work has already been done for us. The ParseDate module has a single class of the same name, which has a single method called parsedate. This method returns an array of elements ...