Extending Date Parsing In Ruby 1.9.3

I had previously made posts about parsing user supplied dates in Ruby

• http://blog.michaelgreenly.com/2012/01/more-parsing-user-supplied-dates-and.html
• http://blog.michaelgreenly.com/2012/01/parsing-user-supplied-dates-and-times.html

Apparently in Ruby 1.9.3 the Date library was re-implemented in C for performance and of course that broke my extension.  I updated it to support Ruby 1.9.3 below

	require 'date'
	class Date
	class << self
	def convert_date_string(input)
	# mm-dd-yyyy
	if input =~ /^(\d{1,2})[^\d\w\s](\d{1,2})[^\d\w\s](\d{4})([T|\W].*)?/
	"%0.4d/%0.2d/%0.2d#{$4}" % [$3, $1, $2].map(&:to_i)
	# mm-dd-yy
	elsif input =~ /^(\d{1,2})[^\d\w\s](\d{1,2})[^\d\w\s](\d{1,2})([T|\W].*)?/
	"%0.4d/%0.2d/%0.2d#{$4}" % ["#{today.century}#{$3}", $1, $2].map(&:to_i)
	# mm-dd
	elsif input =~ /^(\d{1,2})[^\d\w\s](\d{1,2})([T\W].*)?/i
	"%0.4d/%0.2d/%0.2d#{$3}" % [today.year, $1, $2].map(&:to_i)
	# 28/Jan
	elsif input =~ /^(\d+)[^\w\d]((jan)|(feb)|(mar)|(apr)|(may)|(jun)|(jul)|(aug)|(sep)|(oct)|(nov)|(dec))(\s.*)?/i
	"#{$1}/#{$2}#{$3}"
	else
	input
	end
	end
	alias _original_parse _parse
	def _parse(input, comp=true)
	_original_parse(convert_date_string(input), comp)
	end
	alias original_parse parse
	def parse(input, comp=true)
	original_parse(convert_date_string(input), comp)
	end
	end
	end

view raw gistfile1.rb hosted with ❤ by GitHub

This may not work on Ruby versions prior to 1.9.3 I didn't try it.

I also found the american_date gem which apparently existed before I had originally written my extension and is almost certainly a better choice if you don't need any custom formats.