This is a programming puzzle from Spotify. I see this as a nice exercise to get myself familiarized with programming in Ruby. I don't have that much experience with Ruby, but I'm coming from a VB.net and C# background, mixed with some C/C++/PHP/Perl too. I apologize if it doesn't look like how Ruby code should look.

Also note, Spotify is asking for solutions to this problem in C/C++, Java, or Python. So I feel okay publishing this in Ruby, as it won't be submitted anyway.

Note: When as part of Input the problem states: "You may assume that the year, when given with four digits, is between 2000 and 2999." I think that's incorrect. It should rather be: "You may assume that the year, when given with TWO digits, is between 2000 and 2099." That seems to make more sense to me. If it's FOUR digits, then either it's between 2000 and 2999, or it isn't. There's really no need to assume. The assumption really needs to be made when we're dealing with two digits for date. Example: 11/11/11, should assume to mean November 11, 2011, not November 11, 1911.

How to run: % ruby main.rb "path_to_file"

I've included some sample input files. So you can run: % ruby main.rb "input_files/sample_input_01.txt"

Source: https://www.spotify.com/us/jobs/tech/best-before/

From the website (as of Aug 16, 2011):

Best Before Problem ID: bestbefore

Just about any product found in a grocery store has a "best before" date printed on it. Unfortunately, the format for these dates can vary quite a bit: what is it supposed to mean that the bread you bought yesterday is "best before 12/11/10"? It could mean that the bread expires on November 10, 2012 (now that's a suspiciously durable bread and probably it is not healthy for you for other reasons!), or it could mean that the bread expired on December 11, 2010 (d'oh!), or a variety of other options. To be safe, the truly paranoid (or healthily skeptic, depending on who you ask) person would assume that it means "best before November 12, 2010", since that is the earliest possible date. On the other hand, seeing "31/5/2012" even the truly paranoid person knows that this must mean May 31, 2012 since that is the only possible real date using these three numbers.

Given a possibly ambiguous date "A/B/C", where A,B,C are integers between 0 and 2999, output the earliest possible legal date between Jan 1, 2000 and Dec 31, 2999 (inclusive) using them as day, month and year (but not necessarily in that order).

Recall that a year is a leap year (has 366 days) if the year is divisible by 4, unless it is divisible also by 100 but not by 400 (so 2000 is a leap year, 2100 is not a leap year, and 2012 is a leap year).

Input The input file consists of a single line containing three integers separated by "/". There are no extra spaces around the "/". Years may be truncated to two digits and may in that case also omit the leading 0 (if there is one), so 2000 could be given as "2000", "00" or "0" (but not as an empty string). Months and days may be zero-padded. You may assume that the year, when given with four digits, is between 2000 and 2999. At most one of the integers has four digits, and the others have one or two digits.

Output Output a single line giving the earliest legal date possible given the above constraints. The output should be formatted as year-month-day, where year has four digits, and month and day have two digits each (zero padding), for example "2011-07-15". If there is no legal date (subject to the above constraints) then output a single line with the original string followed by the words "is illegal".

Sample input 1 02/4/67 Sample output 1 2067-02-04

Sample input 1 31/9/73 Sample output 1 31/9/73 is illegal