Format date without whitespace in Rails

Question

API that I use returns date as "20090320" which is Y, m and d.

How can I format it in rails to have for example 20-03-2009?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Do as below using Date::parse and Date#strftime:

require 'date'
d = Date.parse "20090320" # => #<Date: 2009-03-20 ((2454911j,0s,0n),+0s,2299161j)> 
d.strftime('%d-%m-%Y') # => "20-03-2009" 

In one line write as

Date.parse("20090320").strftime('%d-%m-%Y')

Answer 2

in rails you can use to_date:

"20090320".to_date
=> Fri, 20 Mar 2009
"20090320".to_date.strftime("%d-%m-%Y")
=> "20-03-2009"

Answer 3

The method's that you're looking for are parse and strftime on the Date class.

You'll need to require date from the ruby standard library for this to work though.

Here is an example

require 'date'

puts Date.parse("20090320").strftime("%d-%m-%Y") # 20-03-2009

Answer 4

Date.strptime('20090320', '%Y%m%d').strftime('%d-%m-%Y')