Parse Date string in Ruby
You could use the Date.strptime method provided in Ruby's Standard Library:
require 'date'string = "20120723"date = Date.strptime(string,"%Y%m%d")Alternately, as suggested in the comments, you could use Date.parse, because the heuristics work correctly in this case:
require 'date'string = "20120723"date = Date.parse(string)Both will raise an ArgumentError if the date is not valid:
require 'date'Date.strptime('2012-March', '%Y-%m')#=> ArgumentError: invalid dateDate.parse('2012-Foo') # Note that '2012-March' would actually work here#=> ArgumentError: invalid dateIf you also want to represent hours, minutes, and so on, you should look at DateTime. DateTime also provides a parse method which works like the parse method on Date. The same goes for strptime.