Declan,
All setting you've set affect only date formatting but not parsing. And unfortunately it seems that there are no clean way to parse DD.MM.YYYY dates in Ruby. But there is a dirty way:
# put it in some initializer class << Date alias _parse_without_eu_format _parse def _parse(str, comp = false) str = str.to_s str = "#{$3}-#{$2}-#{$1}" if /(\d{2})\.(\d{2})\.(\d{4})/ =~ str _parse_without_eu_format(str, comp) end end
class << Date def try_parse(string, default = nil) components = ParseDate.parsedate(string) components.first ? new(*components[0..2]) : default end end
# then the dates will be parsed correctly p Date.parse("22.04.2009") p Date.parse("04/22/2009")
Dmitry
