Change string in a date format to another format

Question

I have a string like this (YYYYMMDD):

20120225

And I want to have a string like this (MM/DD/YYYY):

02/25/2012

What's a good way of doing this in Ruby? I have thought about converting the first string to a Date, and then change the format. Or just treating the string and getting the parts I want and build the new string.

Answer 1

Parsing it then formatting it is the best solution:

Date.parse("20120225").strftime("%m/%d/%Y")  #=> "02/25/2012"

Answer 2

strptime parses the string representation of date with the specified template and creates a date object.

Date.strptime('20120225', '%Y%m%d').strftime("%m/%d/%Y")  #=> "02/25/2012"