Is there an easy way to fetch year from a date string in ruby?

Question

might be a stupid question... I am a new to ruby and recently I am writing a rake task to merge multiple tables into a general one. One thing I need to do is to fetch the date from the database and then convert the date into two integers as year and month and then save them into two separate columns.

I finished this task file last week but unfortunately that file is removed by accident, so I have to write the code again. I didn't remember how I manipulated the date in the original file, I think that the way I took in the original file is way more straightforward than the current code. The current code is as follows.

fetched_time=DateTime.strptime(pr.fetched_time,"%Y-%m-%d")
dr.year =  fetched_time.strftime('%Y').to_i
dr.month = fetched_time.strftime('%m').to_i

I have tried many key words to search, but none of the results is helpful. Is the following code the best way to convert the date string to integer?

Thank you very much.

Answer 1

now = Time.now.to_s
# => "2013-09-10 11:09:14 -0500"
fetched_time=DateTime.strptime(now, "%Y-%m-%d").to_s
# => "2013-09-10T00:00:00+00:00"
year =  Date.parse(fetched_time).year
# => 2013
month = Date.parse(fetched_time).month
# => 9
year.class
# => Fixnum
month.class
# => Fixnum

Or

fetched_date=Date.strptime(now, "%Y-%m-%d").to_s
# => "2013-09-10"
date = Date.parse(fetched_date)
# => #<Date: 2013-09-10 ((2456546j,0s,0n),+0s,2299161j)>

Wouldn't you rather use a Date object than a String anyway? What do timestamps consist of? I'm new to Rails and ActiveRecord.

What are you setting your ActiveRecord::Base.default_timezone = # to be?

In case you want to know what those extra numbers are in a Date object try pluging them in to

Date.jd(2299161)
# => #<Date: 1582-10-15 ((2299161j,0s,0n),+0s,2299161j)>
Date.jd(2456546)
# => #<Date: 2013-09-10 ((2456546j,0s,0n),+0s,2299161j)>

They are Julian Day Numbers. That last one is for calendar reform for Italy and some catholic countries.

Date::ITALY
# => 2299161

Answer 2

Yes possible, by using Date#year:

require 'date'

d = Date.parse("20-08-2013")
d.year # => 2013