You could use the Date.strptime method provided in Ruby’s Standard Library: require ‘date’ string = “20120723” date = Date.strptime(string,”%Y%m%d”) Alternately, as suggested in the comments, you could use Date.parse, because the heuristics work correctly in this case: require ‘date’ string = “20120723” date = Date.parse(string) Both will raise an ArgumentError if the date is not … Read more
Sam Ruby has a cool slideshow that outline the differences. In the interest of bringing this information inline for easier reference, and in case the link goes dead in the abstract future, here’s an overview of Sam’s slides. The slideshow is less overwhelming to review, but having it all laid out in a list like … Read more
A workaround for this was just added to the ‘aws’ gem so thought I’d share as it was inspired by this post. https://github.com/appoxy/aws/blob/master/lib/awsbase/require_relative.rb unless Kernel.respond_to?(:require_relative) module Kernel def require_relative(path) require File.join(File.dirname(caller[0]), path.to_str) end end end This allows you to use require_relative as you would in ruby 1.9.2 in ruby 1.8 and 1.9.1.