How to declare a date with string in Ruby on Rails

Question

I can print the date today using the code DateTime.now.strftime("%d/%m/%Y %H:%M")

But what if I want to combine some of it with string such as DateTime.now.last_month.strftime("25/%m/%Y 00:00")

Is it possible to achieve this?

I want to select the 25th day of the last month and use it in a condition.

This condition if DateTime.now.strftime("%d/%m/%Y %H:%M") > DateTime.now.last_month.strftime("25/%m/%Y 00:00") returns false (with string)

While this condition if if DateTime.now.strftime("%d/%m/%Y %H:%M") > DateTime.now.last_month.strftime("%d/%m/%Y %H:%M") returns true (without string)

Answer 1

If I properly understood what you are looking for, you are after getting 25th of the previous month. Use Time#new :

ma = (DateTime.now - 1.month)
#⇒ Sun, 03 Jun 2018 11:07:24 +0200
DateTime.new(ma.year, ma.month, 25, 0, 0, 0, "+00:00")
#⇒ Mon, 25 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Now compare whatever you want against it.

Answer 2

You can also do something like this for getting 25th date of month

 DateTime.current.last_month.beginning_of_month + 24.days
 => Mon, 25 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Answer 3

@mudasobwa answer will work.

But I guess it can be done a little bit safer from using - 1.month by using .ago

Example: ma = 1.month.ago

Then you can add this piece that he wrote: DateTime.new(ma.year, ma.month, 25, 0, 0, 0, "+00:00")

Also when you can compare the dates, it's better to use UTC so you don't compare two datetimes with different timezones

Example: if your_datetime.utc > ma.utc