Getting a date

Elixir 1.3 has introduced calendars and calendar types. Lets check out how to get a Date type!

You can use the new function and pass in year, month and day separately.

iex > Date.new(2008, 6, 28)
{:ok, ~D[2008-06-28]}

If you want a nonsensical date you'll get an :error atom back.

iex > Date.new(2008, 6, 31)
{:error, :invalid_date}

Elixir knows how to handle ISO8601 date formatted strings. Don't forget to zero pad that month value!

iex > Date.from_iso8601("2008-6-28")
{:error, :invalid_format}
iex > Date.from_iso8601("2008-06-28")
{:ok, ~D[2008-06-28]}

To support Erlang the from_erl function will accept a tuple.

iex > Date.from_erl({2008, 6, 28})
{:ok, ~D[2008-06-28]}

It's interesting that the date is inspected as a sigil.

iex > {:ok, d} = Date.from_erl({2008, 6, 28})
{:ok, ~D[2008-06-28]}
iex > d
~D[2008-06-28]

Hey you can create a date with the new sigil syntax!

iex > ~D[2008-06-28]
~D[2008-06-28]