Format Date in Ruby

Question

I have a date returned as a string:

date_str = "2018-08-17"

How would I format this in to another standard date format, eg. 17/08/2018 programatically without having to parse the string manually?

Answer 1

Chronic (https://github.com/mojombo/chronic) is a good gem for parsing date/time in any format, including human readable ones.

require 'chronic' 
Chronic.parse("2018-08-17")

The nice thing about Chronic is that you can parse even human readable times, like "tomorrow", or "next month".

Chronic.parse('tomorrow')

Answer 2

Use ::strptime to convert the string to date object, and then convert it to string again with #strftime method.

require 'date'
Date.strptime('2018-08-17', '%Y-%m-%d').strftime("%d/%m/%Y")
# => "17/08/2018"