'rails i18n - How to handle case of a nil date being passed ie l(nil)

I am working with a lot of legacy data and occasionally a datetime field is nil/null. This breaks the localization. Is there a recommended way of fixing this aside from doing this:

dt = nil
l(dt) unless dt.nil?
ruby-on-rails


Solution 1:[1]

I think there is a cleaner way to fix this. I monkey patched I18n in an initializer called relaxed_i18n.rb

This is the content of that file:

module I18n

  class << self

    alias_method :original_localize, :localize

    def localize object, options = {}
      object.present? ? original_localize(object, options) : ''
    end

  end

end

And this is the RSpec code I used to validate the output of this method:

require 'rails_helper'

describe 'I18n' do
  it "doesn't crash and burn on nil" do
    expect(I18n.localize(nil)).to eq ''
  end

  it 'returns a date with Dutch formatting' do
    date = Date.new(2013, 5, 17)
    expect(I18n.localize(date, format: '%d-%m-%Y')).to eq '17-05-2013'
  end
end

Solution 2:[2]

To extend Larry K's answer,

The helper should include a hash to pass options to I18n.

def ldate(dt, hash = {})
  dt ? l(dt, hash) : nil
end

This allows you to pass options like this:

= ldate @term.end_date, format: :short

Solution 3:[3]

I recently updated an application that uses jankeesvw's relaxed i18n method to Ruby 3.1 and found an issue with missing arguments.

The related change in the I18n gem is this: ruby-i18n/i18n#5eeaad7.
Also this Ruby 3 change is related: https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2019/12/12/separation-of-positional-and-keyword-arguments-in-ruby-3-0/

Updated the code with this:

module I18n
  class << self
    alias original_localize localize

    def localize(object, locale: nil, format: nil, **options)
      object.present? ? original_localize(object, locale: locale, format: format, **options) : ''
    end
  end
end

And it works again!

Sources

This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Overflow and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Source: Stack Overflow

Solution Source
Solution 1 Daniel Hollands
Solution 2 nslocum
Solution 3 Spa

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