How can I use US-style dates in Rails using Ruby 1.9?

Question

I\'m in the U.S., and we usually format dates as "month/day/year". I\'m trying to make sure that my Rails app, using Ruby 1.9, assumes this format everywhere, and

Answer 1

For parsing US-style dates, you could use:

Date.strptime(date_string, '%m/%d/%Y')

In console:

> Date.strptime('04/01/2011', '%m/%d/%Y')
 => Fri, 01 Apr 2011 
> Date.strptime('4/1/2011', '%m/%d/%Y')
 => Fri, 01 Apr 2011