How to check if a string is a valid date

Question

I have a string: \"31-02-2010\" and want to check whether or not it is a valid date. What is the best way to do it?

I need a method which which returns

Answer 1

Here is a simple one liner:

DateTime.parse date rescue nil

I probably wouldn't recommend doing exactly this in every situation in real life as you force the caller to check for nil, eg. particularly when formatting. If you return a default date|error it may be friendlier.