Solutions @ hans-eric.com

Problem:
We want to extract a date and time of the format YYYY-MM-DD MM:SS from a body of text using Ruby.
Solution:
This is extremely easy in ruby, and other languages that features regular expressions.

require “Date”

text = “Some text containing a date and a time, for instance 2010-03-19 17:25.”

if text =~ /(\d{4})-(\d{2})-(\d{2}) (\d{2}):(\d{2})/
dt = DateTime.new($1.to_i, $2.to_i, [...]

Problem:
If you want to round a floating point number off to two decimals, there is no standard method in Ruby that does it for you.
Solution:
The general solution is
(f * 10**d).round.to_f / 10**d
where f is the floating number and d is the number of decimals.
See my code sample for adding this functionality to the Float class.
Although [...]