What is causing this invalid date error?

Question

On this line of code:

@note.date = Date.strptime(params[:custom_date], '%d-%m-%Y') unless params[:custom_date].blank?

I get this error:

ArgumentError: invalid date
/usr/ruby1.9.2/lib/ruby/1.9.1/date.rb:1022

Here are the parameters:

{
  "commit"             => "Create",
  "utf8"               => "\342\234\223",
  "authenticity_token" => "RKYZNmRaElg/hT5tlmLcqnstnOapdhiaWmDcjNDtSOI=",
  "action"             => "create",
  "note"               => { "name"=>"note1", "detail"=>"detail" },
  "controller"         => "notes",
  "custom_date"        => "03-03-2010"
}

What is causing this error? Thanks for reading.

Answer 1

The parameters you are getting is

{"commit"=>"Create",
 "utf8"=>"\342\234\223",
 "authenticity_token"=>"RKYZNmRaElg/hT5tlmLcqnstnOapdhiaWmDcjNDtSOI=",
 "action"=>"create",
 "note"=>
  {"name"=>"note1",
   "detail"=>"detail"},
 "controller"=>"notes",
 "custom_date"=>"03-03-2010"}

Hence we can clearly make out

its not params[:custom_date] but it is params['custom_date']

UPDATE

Date.strptime method follows a particular pattern.For instance

str = "01-12-2010" #DD-MM-YYYY
then use
Date.strptime(str,"%d-%m-%Y")

but if

str = "2010-12-01" #YYYY-MM-DD
then use
Date.strptime(str,"%Y-%m-%d")

Answer 2

Use to_date method to format params[:custom_date]

@note.date = (Date.strptime(params[:custom_date], '%d-%m-%Y')).to_date unless params[:custom_date].blank?   

Thanks

Answer 3

I'm not able to reproduce this error on ruby 1.9.2 or ruby 1.8.7

I suspect that your param[:custom_date] changes between the log output u've shown and the Date.strptime call.

Rails symbolizes the params keys so it's possible to read them as params[:custom_date]