Date.parse() with Ruby 1.9 is now defaulting to the European date style, John Wayne would be sad, and our apps don't work right, so this fixes it

date.rb

# Date.parse() with Ruby 1.9 is now defaulting to the European date style where the format is DD/MM/YYYY, not MM/DD/YYYY
# patch it to use US format by default
class Date
  class << self
    alias :euro_parse :_parse
    def _parse(str,comp=false)
      str = str.to_s.strip
      if str == ''
        {}
      elsif str =~ /^(\d{1,2})[-\/](\d{1,2})[-\/](\d{2,4})/
        year,month,day = $3.to_i,$1,$2
        date,*rest = str.split(' ')
        year += (year < 35 ? 2000 : 1900) if year < 100
        euro_parse("#{year}-#{month}-#{day} #{rest.join(' ')}",comp)
      else
        euro_parse(str,comp)
      end  
    end
  end
end

Thanks for this, saved me a lot of headaches! However, I believe _parse should return an empty hash instead of nil in the case of a blank string. Looks like that's how the original _parse functions as well.

Correct, thanks for the heads up

Any idea why this doesn't work with Ruby 1.9.3? euro_parse gets defined, but _parse doesn't get overridden.

@bbhoss my guess is another require/include is overwriting _parse without an alias after the euro_parse monkeys run