Format date without whitespace in Rails

Question

API that I use returns date as "20090320" which is Y, m and d.

How can I format it in rails to have for example 20-03-2009?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Date.strptime('20090320', '%Y%m%d').strftime('%d-%m-%Y')

Answer 2

Do as below using Date::parse and Date#strftime:

require 'date'
d = Date.parse "20090320" # => #<Date: 2009-03-20 ((2454911j,0s,0n),+0s,2299161j)> 
d.strftime('%d-%m-%Y') # => "20-03-2009" 

In one line write as

Date.parse("20090320").strftime('%d-%m-%Y')

Answer 3

in rails you can use to_date:

"20090320".to_date
=> Fri, 20 Mar 2009
"20090320".to_date.strftime("%d-%m-%Y")
=> "20-03-2009"