Rails - Get the current week's and month's start and end dates

Question

I am new to ruby on rails and got stuck in dates. I used Time.now to get the current time. Now I want to find out the srart and end dates for the current week and current month. For instance:

If Time.now returns me -

2012-08-13 15:25:35 +0530

Then the start and end dates for the current week are:

2012-08-12 - 2012-08-18

Then the start and end dates for the current month are:

2012--08-01 - 2012-08-31

I am implementing the same using the code:

Time.now.wday   
 => 1 

Time.now - 1.day
=> 2012-08-12 15:31:44 +0530 

Time.now + 5.day
 => 2012-08-19 15:32:38 +0530

and so on.. But I dont find it a convenient way to do this. Iam sure Ruby on Rails does hold a better solution. Can anyone suggest to figure out the same..

Answer 1

Instead of using Time.now

Use the following code to get your queries solved

d = Date.today

d.at_beginning_of_week
#Mon, 13 Aug 2012
d.at_beginning_of_week.strftime
#"2012-08-13"
d.at_beginning_of_week.strftime("%d")
#"13" -> To print the date.

Similarly you can find multiple methods in the Date Class

Answer 2

Check out the Date class:

http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/Date.html

The methods beginning_of_* and end_of_* look like exactly what you're after. For the week, you can even pass in what day you consider the start of the week.