Ruby and Rails "Date.today" format

Question

In IRB, if I run following commands:

require 'date'
Date.today

I get the following output:

=> #<Date: 2015-09-26 ((2457292j,0s,0n),+0s,2299161j)> 

But in Rails console, if I run Date.today, I get this:

=> Sat, 26 Sep 2015 

I looked at Rails' Date class but can't find how Rails' Date.today displays the output differently than Ruby's output.

Can anybody tell, in Rails how Date.today or Date.tomorrow formats the date to display nicely?

Solution 1

The answer to your question is ActiveSupport's core extension to Date class. It overrides the default implementations of inspect and to_s:

# Overrides the default inspect method with a human readable one, e.g., "Mon, 21 Feb 2005"
def readable_inspect
  strftime('%a, %d %b %Y')
end
alias_method :default_inspect, :inspect
alias_method :inspect, :readable_inspect

Command line example:

ruby-2.2.0 › irb
>> require 'date'
=> true
>> Date.today
=> #<Date: 2015-09-27 ((2457293j,0s,0n),+0s,2299161j)>
>> require 'active_support/core_ext/date'
=> true
>> Date.today
=> Sun, 27 Sep 2015

Solution 2

Rails' strftime or to_s methods should do what you need.

For example, using to_s:

2.2.1 :004 > Date.today.to_s(:long)
 => "September 26, 2015" 
2.2.1 :005 > Date.today.to_s(:short)
 => "26 Sep" 

Solution 3

If you run this:

require 'date'
p Date.today.strftime("%a, %e %b %Y")

You'll get this: "Sat, 26 Sep 2015"

Comments

[Lalu]

Hi Brito, my question is when I run Date.today, how rails is displaying => Sat, 26 Sep 2015?

[Leo Brito]

@Lalu probably because Rails calls to_s somewhere when initializing Date. I'll have to research some more to confirm though.

[Lalu]

Yes Brito, that is what I also think, but I can't figure it out. Please update your answer if you find out. Thanks anyway!

[Lalu]

Thanks Alexey, that is what I was exactly looking for!