finding differences between dates

[Joseph Paish]

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

[Paul Brannan]

Use the Date class:

irb(main):008:0> require 'date'
=> true
irb(main):009:0> Date.parse('11/05/1994') - Date.parse('3/7/1988')
=> Rational(2434, 1)

[Joseph Paish]

interesting.

my primary source for ruby information is the first edition of the Pickaxe
book. didn't find anything about "parse" under Date. now i know.

thank you

joe