Had a bit of a pain with Ruby's handling of Date/Time values coming from a Date_Select form element, managed to solve it though.
The problem was that in my form...
<%=date_select(:date,'',:start_year => 1950,:include_blank => false, :default => { :year => '1970' })%>
...the value I got back from the submitted field,
params[:date]
became...
'(3i)4(1i)1953(2i)5'
Bit of a mess, obviously I was expecting something a little more legible like 1953-5-4 (yyyy-mm-dd), so I bashed my head against a brick wall trying to work it out, I could have made my life easier with some select_date blocks but I'm a guy how likes to ask 'why' so I perceviered.
Turns out in my travels you can do this to break it into a usable DateTime object..
Time.mktime(params[:date]['(1i)'],params[:date]['(2i)'],params[:date]['(3i)'])
Which will return something much more legible...
Sun May 19 00:00:00 +0100 1968
Or whip it into a method to do exactly what you want...
def convert_date(obj)
return "#{obj['(1i)']}-#{obj['(2i)']}-#{obj['(2i)']}"
end
<%=convert_date(params[:date])%>
But wait, it doesn't end there, you could use Date.new or Date.civil to parse it into a real date object like...
def convert_date(obj)
return Date.new(obj['(1i)'].to_i,obj['(2i)'].to_i,obj['(3i)'].to_i)
end
Which will return...
1967-03-19
Much nicer, just remember to use .to_i otherwise you'll get...
comparison of String with 0 failed
Enjoy!
