From: Joseph Paish <jepaish@...>
Date: 2005-06-25T01:30:39+09:00
Subject: finding differences between dates

i have 2 dates in mm/dd/yyyy format and i need to find the number of days in 
between them.  i have googled both the web and the ruby newsgroup and haven't 
found anything that addresses this.  

for what it's worth, this is what the perl code looks like that i am trying to 
convert to ruby :


#!/usr/bin/perl
use Time::Local ; # for days_between subroutine

###################################################
# return the absolute value of the difference between two dates 

sub days_between {

    my $first_date = $_[0] ;
    my $second_date = $_[1] ;

    my ($month1, $day1, $year1) = (split /\//, $first_date) ;
    my ($month2, $day2, $year2) = (split /\//, $second_date) ;

    my $date1 = timelocal 0, 0, 0,  $day1, $month1 - 1, $year1 - 1900 ;
    my $date2 = timelocal 0, 0, 0,  $day2, $month2 - 1, $year2 - 1900 ;
    return abs(($date2 - $date1) / 86400) ; # the number of seconds in a day
}
###################################################


thanks

joe