How do I format a date in ruby to include "rd" as in "3rd"

Question

I want to format a date object so that I can display strings such as "3rd July" or "1st October". I can't find an option in Date.strftime to generate the "rd" and "st". Any one know how to do this?

Answer 1

I'm going to echo everyone else, but I'll just encourage you to download the activesupport gem, so you can just use it as a library. You don't need all of Rails to use ordinalize.

% gem install activesupport
...
% irb 
irb> require 'rubygems'
#=>  true
irb> require 'activesupport'
#=>  true
irb> 3.ordinalize
#=>  "3rd"