Extra space in cucumber step when using to_s(:long)

I have a step that fails with the following...

expected #has_content?("July  4, 2009") to return true, got false

The problem, I think, is the extra space betw开发者_如何学运维een "July" and "4". I am using published_on.to_s(:long) in both the step definition and the view, so I'm not entirely sure where the extra space is coming from.

Any ideas?

It's what happens when you try:

Date.civil(2010, 7, 4).strftime("%e") # => " 4"

And Rails uses %e in their :long format. The funny thing is that %e isn't documented.

I would adjust my step definition to match Ruby behavior if you don't care about the extra space (extra spaces won't show in HTML anyway). If you do care about it, squish it:

Date.civil(2010, 7, 4).to_s(:long).squish # => "July 4, 2010" 

Squish is avaiable in Rails 3. If you're using Rails 2, you can use gsub:

Date.civil(2010, 7, 4).to_s(:long).gsub(/\s+/, " ") # => "July 4, 2010" 

I ran into the same problem with my cucumber test today!

The problem (as iain pointed out) is that Date::DATE_FORMATS[:long] is "%B %e, %Y". The %e, according to ri strftime, yields a blank-padded day number:

  %d - Day of the month, zero-padded (01..31)
          %-d  no-padded (1..31)
  %e - Day of the month, blank-padded ( 1..31)

So by default, this is what I see in Rails 3.1.3:

> d = '2012-02-01'.to_date
=> Wed, 01 Feb 2012

> d.to_s(:long)
=> "February  1, 2012"

Strangely, Rails uses a different day format for the :long format of times (%d, which yields "01") as for dates (%e, which yields " 1"):

> d = '2012-02-01'.to_time
=> 2012-02-01 00:00:00 UTC

> d.to_s(:long)
=> "February 01, 2012 00:00"

> Time::DATE_FORMATS[:long]
=> "%B %d, %Y %H:%M"

> Date::DATE_FORMATS[:long]
=> "%B %e, %Y"

The solution then is to use "%-d" for the day in your format string instead of %e:

> Date::DATE_FORMATS[:long] = "%B %-d, %Y"
=> "%B %-d, %Y"

> d = '2012-02-01'.to_date
Wed, 01 Feb 2012

> d.to_s(:long)
=> "February 1, 2012"

You can just add this line to a new initializer, config/initializers/date_formats.rb:

Date::DATE_FORMATS[:long] = "%B %-d, %Y"

Please comment on https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/1994 if you would like to see this default changed in Rails.

For what it's worth, I would rather use the "%-d" fix (or even "%-e"! which gives the same results) than ".squish", which is Rails-specific, and not as portable (why not use the Ruby-native ".squeeze", or even ".squeeze(' ')" at that then, if you don't want to mess around with the date formats?).

Also, as an update: @iain mentions that '%e' isn't documented. For what it's worth, it is now! (although interestingly, not "%-e" specifically, which, if you do try it, is valid, and works!)