CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rubystringdatetimestrptime
jbowman
jbowman

Reputation: 408

DateTime#strptime returning invalid date error

I have a string which is scraped from Daunt Books:

"Monday 2 December 6.30pm"

but I can't seem to convert it to a DateTime with DateTime#strptime. The date part seems to work:

(byebug) DateTime.strptime(str,"%A %d %B")
#<DateTime: 2019-12-02T00:00:00+00:00 ((2458820j,0s,0n),+0s,2299161j)>

but the time returns an error:

(byebug) DateTime.strptime(str,"%A %d %B %l.%M%P")
*** ArgumentError Exception: invalid date

nil

I know this is the correct #strptime code because it works on the string if it is not scraped from the web page. I can't work out what I need to do to make the string valid for #strptime to work.

EDIT:

Unfortunately the website I was scraping from was redesigned the day after the OP and the scraping code is now defunkt.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 424

Answers (1)

the Tin Man
the Tin Man

Reputation: 160571

I can't duplicate the problem:

require 'date'

str = "Monday 2 December 6.30pm"
DateTime.strptime(str,"%A %d %B %l.%M%P") 
# => #<DateTime: 2019-12-02T18:30:00+00:00 ((2458820j,66600s,0n),+0s,2299161j)>

And this works for me:

require 'date'

foo = "Monday 2 December 6.30pm"

bar = DateTime.strptime(foo, '%a %d %B %l.%M%p')
bar.to_s
# => "2019-12-02T18:30:00+00:00"

and:

DateTime.strptime(foo, '%a %d %B %l.%M%p').strftime('%A %e %B %l:%M%p') 
# => "Monday  2 December  6:30PM"

Upvotes: 2

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