Ruby Classes are Open, Damnit

Published 2011-12-13 @ 16:44

Tagged ruby, thoughts

Ruby Classes are Open. Use it to your advantage. Ruby’s Date.parse changed between 1.8 and 1.9 so that European date formats are preferred over US date formats. I’ve seen a lot of American rubyists whine about this. It took about 5 minutes looking at Date code to figure out that the solution is trivial:

require 'date'

class Date
  class << self
    alias :_temp_us  :_parse_us
    alias :_parse_us :_parse_eu
    alias :_parse_eu :_temp_us
  end
end if RUBY_VERSION =~ /1\.9/

puts Date.parse("10/4/2010") # => 2010-10-04

Recently, Jeremy Evans’ released ruby-american_date to address this issue. You should probably use his solution over mine. Mine is just here as an illustration that it really doesn’t take much time or effort to address your whining.