Chronic parsing date range in console but not in application in rails 3

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hey all,

Chronic will parse a date range in console:

Chronic.parse(1/1/2011 - 1/1/2012, :guess => false) => 2012-01-01 12:00:00 -0500..2012-01-01 12:00:01 -0500

However, when I use logger to check if it's parsing in application, it is not:

         logger.info "The value of history date is #{history_date}" => The value of history date is 1/1/2011 - 1/1/2012           logger.info "The value of date range is #{ Chronic.parse(history_date, :guess => false)}" => The value of date range is

See how it returns nil for second logger. I have no clue why it works fine in console but not in application.

thanks for response

2

This is strange what happened here. Chronic parse was not able to parse a string when it contained a range like this:

"1/1/2011 - 1/1/2012"

So in order to address this, i had to check for the "-" in the string:

if history_date.include? "-"               date_range = Chronic.parse(Date.parse(history_date), :guess => false)

            else               date_range = Chronic.parse(history_date, :guess => false)

            end

Im open to better solutions.

thanks for response

3

Loading development environment (Rails 3.1.2) ruby-1.9.2-p290 :001 > result = Chronic.parse(1/1/2011 - 1/1/2012, :guess => false) => 2012-01-01 12:00:00 -0800..2012-01-01 12:00:01 -0800 ruby-1.9.2-p290 :002 > result = Chronic.parse('1/1/2011 - 1/1/2012', :guess => false) => nil ruby-1.9.2-p290 :003 > result = Chronic.parse(eval('1/1/2011 - 1/1/2012'), :guess => false) => 2012-01-01 12:00:00 -0800..2012-01-01 12:00:01 -0800 ruby-1.9.2-p290 :004 >

HTH!

4

It seems to parse the date wrong:

Chronic.parse(eval("1/1/2011 - 1/1/2012"), :guess => false) => 2012-01-01 12:00:00 -0500..2012-01-01 12:00:01 -0500

I specify two years, 2011 and 2012. And it returns a range of 2012.

5

Actually it returns a span of 1 second :slight_smile:

I was assuming your original example worked, but it doesn't. And I haven't worked with Chronic much, so I'm not sure if that argument is even something it's expected to handle. For example this works fine:

ruby-1.9.2-p290 :007 > result = Chronic.parse('last year', :guess => false) => 2011-01-01 00:00:00 -0800..2012-01-01 00:00:00 -0800 ruby-1.9.2-p290 :008 > result.class => Chronic::Span ruby-1.9.2-p290 :009 > result.width => 31536000

while this obviously doesn't:

ruby-1.9.2-p290 :010 > result = Chronic.parse(1/1/2011 - 1/1/2012, :guess => false) => 2012-01-01 12:00:00 -0800..2012-01-01 12:00:01 -0800 ruby-1.9.2-p290 :011 > result.class => Chronic::Span ruby-1.9.2-p290 :012 > result.width => 1 ruby-1.9.2-p290 :013 >

Time to jump into the gem source, I think :slight_smile: