Sounds like a job for the ParseDate module, which is in the standard library. It's on the web at: http://www.rubycentral.com/book/lib_standard.html#ParseDate.parsedate -- |Data Network Architecture Research Lab mailto:flifson / cs.uct.ac.za |Dept. of Computer Science http://people.cs.uct.ac.za/~flifson |University of Cape Town +27-21-650-3127