Ruby and Rails "Date.today" format

Question

In IRB, if I run following commands:

require 'date'
Date.today

I get the following output:

=> #<Date: 2015-09-26 ((2457292j,0s,0n),+0s,2299161j)> 

But in Rails console, if I run Date.today, I get this:

=> Sat, 26 Sep 2015 

I looked at Rails' Date class but can't find how Rails' Date.today displays the output differently than Ruby's output.

Can anybody tell, in Rails how Date.today or Date.tomorrow formats the date to display nicely?

Answer 1

The answer to your question is ActiveSupport's core extension to Date class. It overrides the default implementations of inspect and to_s:

# Overrides the default inspect method with a human readable one, e.g., "Mon, 21 Feb 2005"
def readable_inspect
  strftime('%a, %d %b %Y')
end
alias_method :default_inspect, :inspect
alias_method :inspect, :readable_inspect

Command line example:

ruby-2.2.0 › irb
>> require 'date'
=> true
>> Date.today
=> #<Date: 2015-09-27 ((2457293j,0s,0n),+0s,2299161j)>
>> require 'active_support/core_ext/date'
=> true
>> Date.today
=> Sun, 27 Sep 2015

Answer 2

Rails' strftime or to_s methods should do what you need.

For example, using to_s:

2.2.1 :004 > Date.today.to_s(:long)
 => "September 26, 2015" 
2.2.1 :005 > Date.today.to_s(:short)
 => "26 Sep"