CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rubydatedate-arithmetic
UserROR
UserROR

Reputation: 240

Number of days between dates

I have two dates: start date and end date. I want to calculate the number of days between end date and start date. If start date is 1-11-2011, end date is 2-11-2012, and I put start date - end date, it will show the number of days as 1, and will not count the months and years. How can I do this in ruby? Kindly help me.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1697

Answers (3)

Apoorv
Apoorv

Reputation: 1389

Try this.

time_ago_in_words(pending_requests.created_at)

This will take care of days and hours both like for example

about 17 hours ago

and 

3 days ago

Upvotes: 1

aef
aef

Reputation: 4698

require 'date'

start_date = Date.parse('1-11-2011')
# => #<Date: 2011-11-01 … >
end_date   = Date.parse('2-11-2012')
# => #<Date: 2012-11-02 … >

inclusive_days_in_range = (start_date .. end_date).count
# => 368

Or if you care about efficiency (two orders of magnitude faster):

inclusive_days_in_range = (end_date - start_date) + 1
# => 368

Please note that if you use Date.parse, the given date string like yours will be interpreted as if it begins with the day and is followed by month and year. If that is not what you want, you must use the Date.strptime method to manually specify your date format, even if I don't know of any nation on Earth where this would be the conventional date format. To be clear and avoid string parsing you could also initialize Date objects the following way:

Date.new(2012, 1, 11)

Another good idea would be to use ISO-8601 (YYYY-MM-DD) format in your application internals and only convert them into localized representations on demand to improve clarity.

Upvotes: 4

sawa
sawa

Reputation: 168101

require "date"
(
  Date.strptime("2-11-2012", "%m-%d-%Y") -
  Date.strptime("1-11-2011", "%m-%d-%Y")
).to_i + 1
# => 397

Upvotes: 5

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