[LRUG] How does Rails decide how to parse ambiguous dates?

[John Winters]

On 27/07/11 09:30, Paul Robinson wrote:
> On 26 Jul 2011, at 17:43, John Winters wrote:
>
>> Yes, that's a nice idea, but it still leaves unanswered the question of how to get an existing date formatted like that in the text field.
>
>
> Wait, what?
>
> Your database column is a date type right? Not just a varchar?

Yes, it's a date type.

> So by "text field" I'm assuming you mean the text input on the form.

Yes.

> But the Rails i18n helpers should look after that for you. So what is it specifically that isn't working?

As far as I can discover, the Rails i18n helpers don't touch the content 
of a field.  I've been doing some web searching and found others with 
the same problem.  I've also dug through the code (as documented in this 
thread) and as far as I can see, there is no code to apply 
internationalisation to the contents of a field.

The text_field code gets its contents by calling 
<attribute_name>_before_type_cast on the model and putting the result 
straight into the field.  It's already a string by the time the model 
hands it over to the field code.

I'm open to correction if you can find some code which applies 
formatting to the contents of such a field.  I'm very much a novice at 
Ruby and Rails (but quite an experienced software developer).

Cheers,
John