What's the most efficient way get the first day of the current month?

With ruby I'm trying to get format a date as such: 2009-10-01

Where I take the current date (2009-10-26) and then change the day to "01".

I know of ways to do this, but was curious what the shortest way is, code wise, to pull this off.

If you don't mind including ActiveSupport in your application, you can simply do this:

require 'active_support'
date = Date.today.beginning_of_month

Time.parse("2009-10-26").strftime("%Y-%m-01")

require 'date'    
now = Date.today
Date.new(now.year, now.month, 1)

Most efficient to get start and end date of current month

@date = DateTime.now   
@date.beginning_of_month
@date.end_of_month

If you need the date object without ActiveSupport, you can go back to the last day of the last month and sum 1.

Date.today - Date.today.mday + 1

Like

Date.today.beginning_of_day
Date.today.end_of_day

And

Date.today.beginning_of_week
Date.today.end_of_week

There also is

Date.today.beginning_of_year
Date.today.end_of_year

This works...

Not terribly clever :/

require 'date'
Date.parse(Date.parse("2009-10-26").to_s[0,8] << "01")

require 'active_support/core_ext'
Date.today.beginning_of_month