From: Jamis Buck <jgb3@...>
Date: 2004-11-04T04:44:29+09:00
Subject: Re: dates earlier than 1970?

Kevin Howe wrote:
> I have a web app that collects new employee info, one of the fields being
> "Birth date". However since many of the employees were born earlier than
> 1970 I am unable to turn these into Ruby Time/Date objects. Is there a ruby
> library that can handle dates earlier than 1970?

String? I honestly don't mean that facetiously, either. If you enforce 
the right format on the strings, you can do date-wise comparisons on 
them, and extract date-part info via regexps:

   "1964-07-25" < "1974-07-25"
   year = "1964-07-25".match(/^(\d\d\d\d)-/ )[1].to_i

Certainly, the above could benefit from a minimal wrapper around it to 
make things like date-part extraction less cumbersome. But for most of 
the things I use dates for, strings suffice.

-- 
Jamis Buck
jgb3@email.byu.edu
http://www.jamisbuck.org/jamis