FatPeriod provides a Ruby Period class for dealing with time periods, that is ranges whose endpoints are Date s. Set operations, for example, are provided for Period, as well as methods for parsing strings into Periods and methods for breaking a larger periods into an array of smaller periods of various ‘chunk’ sizes that correspond to calendar-related periods such as days, weeks, months, and so forth.’

Add this line to your application’s Gemfile:

gem 'fat_period'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install fat_period

A Period is constructed with two arguments for the begin and end date. The begin date must be on or before the end date. Each argument can be (1) a Date, (2) a string parseable as a Date by the Date.parse method, or (3) an object that responds to #to_s and can be parsed as a Date by Date.parse:

p1 = Period.new(Date.today, Date.today + 30)
p2 = Period.new('Nov 22, 1963', Date.today)
p3 = Period.new('1961-01-21', '1963-11-22')
puts "Camelot lasted #{p3.length} days"

The Period class depends on the extensions to Date made by the fat_core gem, which you can read about here. It defines two constants, Date::BOT and Date::EOT, which define beginning of time and end of time for practical commercial purposes.

After checking out the repo, run `bin/setup` to install dependencies. Then, run `rake spec` to run the tests. You can also run `bin/console` for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run `bundle exec rake install`. To release a new version, update the version number in `version.rb`, and then run `bundle exec rake release`, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the `.gem` file to [rubygems.org](https://rubygems.org).

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/ddoherty03/fat_table.