🗓️ Month::Serializer

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🌻 Synopsis

Integer Serialization Plugin for Month Gem

Allows you to convert Month objects to Integer, and vice versa. This is useful for serializing Months into other data structures, like String, or to pass values in JSON, or send as parameters to Resque / Sidekiq jobs (which parameters are only compatible with simple JSON data types. Neither Date or Month can serialize properly to Resque/Sidekiq jobs.

Compatible with 🗓️ month gem v1 and v2. Compatible with Ruby v1.9.3+ and JRuby v9.1+, and tested on all minor versions of Ruby, thanks to 🔍️appraisal2.

Why use Month instead of Date or Time?

• 🗓️ Month objects are lighter weight.
• There are many situations where having Months incrementable by 1 is useful
  • e.g., directly mappable to iteration index
• It facilitates month-based math.
• Adding a day when a day is not relevant, such as for data with a 1-month resolution, can result in very overcomplicated systems that try to work around or ignore the stray days.

💡 Info you can shake a stick at

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Alternatively:

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Tokens to Remember
Works with JRuby
Works with Truffle Ruby
Works with MRI Ruby 3
Works with MRI Ruby 2
Works with MRI Ruby 1
Source
Documentation
Compliance
Style
Support
Maintainer 🎖️
... 💖	🧊 🐙 🛖 🧪

✨ Installation

Install the gem and add to the application's Gemfile by executing:

$ bundle add month-serializer

If bundler is not being used to manage dependencies, install the gem by executing:

$ gem install month-serializer

🔒 Secure Installation

For Medium or High Security Installations

month-serializer is cryptographically signed, and has verifiable SHA-256 and SHA-512 checksums by stone_checksums. Be sure the gem you install hasn’t been tampered with by following the instructions below.

Add my public key (if you haven’t already, expires 2045-04-29) as a trusted certificate:

gem cert --add <(curl -Ls https://raw.github.com/galtzo-floss/certs/main/pboling.pem)

You only need to do that once. Then proceed to install with:

gem install month-serializer -P HighSecurity

The HighSecurity trust profile will verify signed gems, and not allow the installation of unsigned dependencies.

If you want to up your security game full-time:

bundle config set --global trust-policy MediumSecurity

MediumSecurity instead of HighSecurity is necessary if not all the gems you use are signed.

NOTE: Be prepared to track down certs for signed gems and add them the same way you added mine.

🔧 Basic Usage

Add this to the bootstrapping process of your app, somewhere after the month gem is loaded. In Rails, config/initializers/month-serializer.rb would be perfect, but Rails is not required.

Month.send(:include, Month::Serializer)

This spec below, copied from the actual test suite, makes usage pretty clear. Note how the serialized Months as integer increment by one. If you think about counting time by months this makes sense. We often speak this way about babies, an 18 month old, or 24 month old.

How old is the Common Era right now? About 24.2k months! Is a millenimonth, millimes, or kilomonth, a thing? The Common Era is roughly 24 kilomonths old. 😆 And Neanderthal man went extinct about 471 kilomonths ago.

{
  -471359 => Month.new(-39280, 1),  # hist: Extinction of Neanderthal
  24201 => Month.new(2016, 9),
  24202 => Month.new(2016, 10),
    # ...
  24214 => Month.new(2017, 10),
  24215 => Month.new(2017, 11),
    # ...
  24227 => Month.new(2018, 11),
  24228 => Month.new(2018, 12),
}.each do |k, v|
  context "#{k} => #{v}" do
    it "Month converts to #{k}" do
      expect(v.to_i).to(eq(k))          # to_i is added by this gem!
    end
    context "round trip" do
      it "can load #{k} to #{v}" do
        expect(Month.load(k)).to(eq(v)) # load is added by this gem!
      end
      it "can dump #{v} to #{k}" do
        expect(Month.dump(v)).to(eq(k)) # dump is added by this gem!
      end
    end
  end
end

🚚 Switch to main branch

We migrated from master to main as the default branch. If this affected your local checkout:

git branch -m master main
git fetch origin
git branch -u origin/main main
git remote set-head origin -a

🔐 Security

See SECURITY.md.

🤝 Contributing

If you need some ideas of where to help, you could work on adding more code coverage, or if it is already 💯 (see below) check issues, or PRs, or use the gem and think about how it could be better.

We so if you make changes, remember to update it.

See CONTRIBUTING.md for more detailed instructions.

🚀 Release Instructions

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Code Coverage

🪇 Code of Conduct

Everyone interacting with this project's codebases, issue trackers, chat rooms and mailing lists agrees to follow the .

🌈 Contributors

Made with contributors-img.

Also see GitLab Contributors: https://gitlab.com/galtzo-floss/month-serializer/-/graphs/main

⭐️ Star History

📌 Versioning

This Library adheres to . Violations of this scheme should be reported as bugs. Specifically, if a minor or patch version is released that breaks backward compatibility, a new version should be immediately released that restores compatibility. Breaking changes to the public API will only be introduced with new major versions.

📌 Is "Platform Support" part of the public API?

Yes. But I'm obligated to include notes...

SemVer should, but doesn't explicitly, say that dropping support for specific Platforms is a breaking change to an API. It is obvious to many, but not all, and since the spec is silent, the bike shedding is endless.

dropping support for a platform is both obviously and objectively a breaking change

• Jordan Harband (@ljharb, maintainer of SemVer) in SemVer issue 716

To get a better understanding of how SemVer is intended to work over a project's lifetime, read this article from the creator of SemVer:

• "Major Version Numbers are Not Sacred"

As a result of this policy, and the interpretive lens used by the maintainer, you can (and should) specify a dependency on these libraries using the Pessimistic Version Constraint with two digits of precision.

For example:

spec.add_dependency("month-serializer", "~> 1.0")

See CHANGELOG.md for a list of releases.

📄 License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License . See LICENSE.txt for the official Copyright Notice.

© Copyright

• Copyright (c) 2018-2020, 2024-2025 Peter H. Boling, of Galtzo.com , and month-serializer contributors

🤑 One more thing

Having arrived at the bottom of the page, please endure a final supplication. The primary maintainer of this gem, Peter Boling, wants Ruby to be a great place for people to solve problems, big and small. Please consider supporting his efforts via the giant yellow link below, or one of the smaller ones, depending on button size preference.

P.S. If you need help️ or want to say thanks, 👇 Join the Discord.