Formatting a date object to display a human readable date

Question

Here's what I'd like to display:

May 13, 2012 

Here's what is being displayed:

2012-05-13 

I searched for some answers and it led me to "Formatting Dates and Floats in Ruby", where it mentions a possible solution:

<p class="date"><%= @news_item.postdate.to_s("%B %d, %Y") %></p> 

However this doesn't change the output at all. No debugging errors, or exceptions are fired.

I can do this and it works perfectly fine:

<p class="date"><%= Time.now.to_s("%B %d, %Y") %></p> 

Here is my migration file (to see what data type I used):

class CreateNewsItems < ActiveRecord::Migration   def change     create_table :news_items do |t|        t.date :postdate        t.timestamps     end   end end 

Answer 1

Date.to_s is not the same as Time.to_s. Your postdate is a Date, so therefore you might want to look at strftime instead:

postdate.strftime("%B %d, %Y") 

Or even look to add your own custom date format to your Rails app:
Need small help in converting date format in ruby

Answer 2

The to_formatted_s function already has some common human readable formats for DateTime objects in Rails.

datetime.to_formatted_s(:db)            # => "2007-12-04 00:00:00" datetime.to_formatted_s(:short)         # => "04 Dec 00:00" datetime.to_formatted_s(:long)          # => "December 04, 2007 00:00" datetime.to_formatted_s(:long_ordinal)  # => "December 4th, 2007 00:00" datetime.to_formatted_s(:rfc822)        # => "Tue, 04 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000" datetime.to_formatted_s(:iso8601)       # => "2007-12-04T00:00:00+00:00"