Ordinal Dates in Rails

September 2nd, 2008

Though rather simple, here’s the code to display dates such as “August 17th, 2008”, or “September 1st, 2008”. These are helper methods located in my RAILS_ROOT/app/helpers/application_helper.rb. They are used around the site to display the dates.

# September 1st, 2007
def short_date(date)
  date.strftime("%B #{date.day.ordinalize}, %Y")
end

# September 1st
def shorter_date(date)
  date.strftime("%B #{date.day.ordinalize}")
end

The “%B” and “%Y” are symbols representing a part of a date. They are universal for the most part, so take a look at PHP’s date() manual for reference.