Re: Ordinal Date String to Standard Date String for a Beginn

davyb [mailto:[email protected]]

#I have an ordinal date string and I want to change it to an ordinary
#date string. For example: 2005/1 should give January 1, 2005. I see
#ordinal in the Date class but I need a simple example. Thanks,

i hope this is simple enough.

we want to get the year and day values fr your string

re = /(\d+)/(\d+)/ => /(\d+)/(\d+)/
rs = “2005/1” => “2005/1”

y,d=re.match(rs)[1…2] => [“2005”, “1”]

we need to convert them to integers since ordinal wants num

y = y.to_i => 2005
d = d.to_i => 1

od = Date.ordinal(y,d) => #<Date: 4906743/2,0,2299161>

we got a date object

fr here we can do anything

od.year => 2005
od.month => 1
od.day => 1
nd_str1 = od.to_s => “2005-01-01”
nd_str2 = od.strftime(“%B %e, %Y”) => “January 1, 2005”
nd_str3 = nd_str2.squeeze(" ") => “January 1, 2005”

hth.

kind regards
-botp

#Dave

Botp, Todd,
Thanks. Since I had already parsed the ordinal date’s year and day to
get
them in string sortable order, I just had to take your examples and do
this:
require ‘date’ … od = Date.ordinal (strYear.to_i, strOrdn.to_i) and
then
od.to_s gives the sortable (and readable) yyyy-mm-dd string.
Wow, Ruby is powerful, but the documentation on Date (and perhaps other
gem
filled libraries) is hard for a beginner to grok. I found Date’s ordinal
with a Google search, which gave me the built-in documentation, but no
examples. So, if I need at least the APIs for a library such as Date I
use
“ri”?
Thanks again,
Dave
PS Here’s the beginner’s way I used to parse the ordinal date string
(eg
“2005/17”):

strYear = strDate[strDate.index("/")+1, strDate.length]
strOrdn = strDate[0, strDate.index("/")]

Yeah, it’s backwards in the PS – just noticed it. (str.reverse won’t
help!!!)

David Boyd wrote:

Botp, Todd,
Thanks. Since I had already parsed the ordinal date’s year and day to get
them in string sortable order, I just had to take your examples and do this:
require ‘date’ … od = Date.ordinal (strYear.to_i, strOrdn.to_i) and then
od.to_s gives the sortable (and readable) yyyy-mm-dd string.
Wow, Ruby is powerful, but the documentation on Date (and perhaps other gem
filled libraries) is hard for a beginner to grok. I found Date’s ordinal
with a Google search, which gave me the built-in documentation, but no
examples. So, if I need at least the APIs for a library such as Date I use
“ri”?

Yeah, no examples. I guess they just expect us to learn it from them
directly :slight_smile:

Todd

David Boyd wrote:

PS Here’s the beginner’s way I used to parse the ordinal date string (eg
“2005/17”):

strYear = strDate[strDate.index("/")+1, strDate.length]
strOrdn = strDate[0, strDate.index("/")]

strYear, strOrdn = “2005/17”.split("/")

Oh, and strftime doesn’t show up in the online RDoc documentation
(http://www.ruby.org/core). Sometimes, stuff like this gets a little
frustrating so I end up using .public_methods or
.instance_methods to find out what’s cooking underneath the
hood. I understand keeping docs up to date for a relatively volatile
language like Ruby is difficult.

It does say at the top of the Date doc:

See the documentation to the file date.rb for an overview.

This is on the same page, upper left frame, called lib/date.rb. There
are a couple examples there.

ri doesn’t work on my machine for some reason. I probably just have to
reinstall it.

Todd

On Sat, 19 Nov 2005, Todd wrote:

Oh, and strftime doesn’t show up in the online RDoc documentation
(http://www.ruby.org/core). Sometimes, stuff like this gets a little

http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/date/rdoc/classes/Date.html#M000404
http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/date/rdoc/classes/DateTime.html#M000416

    Hugh

How elegant! Thanks!
Dave

Hugh S. wrote:

On Sat, 19 Nov 2005, Todd wrote:

Oh, and strftime doesn’t show up in the online RDoc documentation
(http://www.ruby.org/core). Sometimes, stuff like this gets a little

http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/date/rdoc/classes/Date.html#M000404
http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/date/rdoc/classes/DateTime.html#M000416

    Hugh

Oops, I meant RDoc Documentation

So, I guess I should really be looking at the Standard Library API
instead of the Core API link from now on?

Todd