I've been working with a rails form all day and I was just randomly testing it and tried the date 25/12/2009 and it came up with a huge error.
It was at this point I realised that rails is set to american date mode (mm/dd/yyyy) instead of the UK style: dd/mm/yyyy.
How can I set rails to automatically deal with all dates in dd/mm/yyyy format?
In your settings file: config/environment.rb"
my_date_formats = { :default => '%d/%m/%Y' } ActiveSupport::CoreExtensions::Time::Conversions::DATE_FORMATS.merge!(my_date_formats) ActiveSupport::CoreExtensions::Date::Conversions::DATE_FORMATS.merge!(my_date_formats) source: http://thedevelopercorner.blogspot.com/2009/03/change-default-date-format-in-ruby-on.html
If you're using @Chris Ballance's solution note that Rails now modifies the Date class directly so you'll get an uninitialized constant ActiveSupport error with the solution.
See: uninitialized constant ActiveSupport::CoreExtensions
The updated argument:
my_date_formats = { :default => '%d/%m/%Y' } Time::DATE_FORMATS.merge!(my_date_formats) Date::DATE_FORMATS.merge!(my_date_formats) You can change the date format using internationalisation (I18n)
Just add (or change) this in your config/locales/en.yml:
en: date: order: - :day - :month - :year You're looking more for something like this, although that solution still isn't too elegant.
http://source.mihelac.org/2006/9/13/parsing-european-date-format-in-ruby-rails
Updated I18n...
date: formats: default: "%m/%d/%Y" short: "%b %d" long: "%B %d, %Y" I solved this by adding getters and setters named mydatefield_formatted which explicitly do what I want, and use those everywhere. Probably a shopping list of reasons not to do this but I quite like it so I thought I'd leave it here.
app/models/mymodel.rb
class Mymodel lib/value_formatters.rb
module ValueFormatters extend ActiveSupport::Concern module ClassMethods def add_value_formatters columns.each do |column| case column.type when :datetime define_method("#{column.name}_formatted") { General.format_datetime(self.read_attribute(column.name)) } define_method("#{column.name}_formatted=") {|value| self.update_attribute(column.name, General.parse_datetime(value)) } when :date define_method("#{column.name}_formatted") { General.format_date(self.read_attribute(column.name)) } define_method("#{column.name}_formatted=") {|value| self.update_attribute(column.name, General.parse_date(value)) } when :boolean define_method("#{column.name}_formatted") { General.format_boolean(self.read_attribute(column.name)) } define_method("#{column.name}_formatted=") {|value| self.update_attribute(column.name, General.parse_boolean(value)) } else # do nothing end unless self.class.respond_to?("#{column.name}_formatted") end end end end lib/general.rb
class General def self.parse_date(value, end_of_day = false) result = nil begin if value.present? if value.length == 8 result = DateTime.strptime(value, '%d/%m/%y') if result.year > Time.new.year + 1 result = DateTime.new(result.year - 100, result.month, result.day) end else result = DateTime.strptime(value, '%d/%m/%Y') end end rescue Exception=>e # end result = result + 23.hours + 59.minutes + 59.seconds if result && end_of_day result end def self.parse_datetime(value) result = nil begin if value.present? result = DateTime.strptime(value, '%d/%m/%Y %H:%M') result = nil if result e # end result end def self.format_date(value) value.present? ? value.strftime('%d/%m/%Y') : '' end def self.format_datetime(value) value.present? ? value.strftime('%d/%m/%Y at %H:%M') : '' end def self.format_boolean(value, default = nil) value = default if value == nil case value when true 'Yes' when false 'No' else 'Unspecified' end end def self.parse_boolean(value, default = false) case value.to_s.downcase when 'true' when 'yes' when '1' when 'on' true when 'false' when 'no' when '0' when 'off' false else default end end end