Get person's age in Ruby

I know I'm late to the party here, but the accepted answer will break horribly when trying to work out the age of someone born on the 29th February on a leap year. This is because the call to birthday.to_date.change(:year => now.year) creates an invalid date.

I used the following code instead:

require 'date'

def age(dob)
  now = Time.now.utc.to_date
  now.year - dob.year - ((now.month > dob.month || (now.month == dob.month && now.day >= dob.day)) ? 0 : 1)
end

I've found this solution to work well and be readable for other people:

    age = Date.today.year - birthday.year
    age -= 1 if Date.today < birthday + age.years #for days before birthday

Easy and you don't need to worry about handling leap year and such.

Use this:

def age
  now = Time.now.utc.to_date
  now.year - birthday.year - (birthday.to_date.change(:year => now.year) > now ? 1 : 0)
end

The answers so far are kinda weird. Your original attempt was pretty close to the right way to do this:

birthday = DateTime.new(1900, 1, 1)
age = (DateTime.now - birthday) / 365.25 # or (1.year / 1.day)

You will get a fractional result, so feel free to convert the result to an integer with to_i. This is a better solution because it correctly treats the date difference as a time period measured in days (or seconds in the case of the related Time class) since the event. Then a simple division by the number of days in a year gives you the age. When calculating age in years this way, as long as you retain the original DOB value, no allowance needs to be made for leap years.

I believe this is functionally equivalent to @philnash's answer, but IMO more easily understandable.

class BirthDate
  def initialize(birth_date)
    @birth_date = birth_date
    @now = Time.now.utc.to_date
  end

  def time_ago_in_years
    if today_is_before_birthday_in_same_year?
      age_based_on_years - 1
    else
      age_based_on_years
    end
  end

  private

  def age_based_on_years
    @now.year - @birth_date.year
  end

  def today_is_before_birthday_in_same_year?
    (@now.month < @birth_date.month) || ((@now.month == @birth_date.month) && (@now.day < @birth_date.day))
  end
end

Usage:

> BirthDate.new(Date.parse('1988-02-29')).time_ago_in_years
 => 31 

class User
  def age
    return unless birthdate
    (Time.zone.now - birthdate.to_time) / 1.year
  end
end

Can be checked with the following test:

RSpec.describe User do
  describe "#age" do
    context "when born 29 years ago" do
      let!(:user) { create(:user, birthdate: 29.years.ago) }

      it "has an age of 29" do
        expect(user.age.round).to eq(29)
      end
    end
  end
end

I think it's alot better to do not count months, because you can get exact day of a year by using Time.zone.now.yday.

def age
  years  = Time.zone.now.year - birthday.year
  y_days = Time.zone.now.yday - birthday.yday

  y_days < 0 ? years - 1 : years
end

Came up with a Rails variation of this solution

def age(dob)
    now = Date.today
    age = now.year - dob.year
    age -= 1 if dob > now.years_ago(age)
    age
end

DateHelper can be used to get years only

puts time_ago_in_words '1999-08-22'

almost 20 years

  def computed_age
    if birth_date.present?
      current_time.year - birth_date.year - (age_by_bday || check_if_newborn ? 0 : 1)
    else
      age.presence || 0
    end
  end


  private

  def current_time
    Time.now.utc.to_date
  end

  def age_by_bday
    current_time.month > birth_date.month
  end

  def check_if_newborn
    (current_time.month == birth_date.month && current_time.day >= birth_date.day)
  end```

Here's my solution which also allows calculating the age at a specific date:

def age on = Date.today
  (_ = on.year - birthday.year) - (on < birthday.since(_.years) ? 1 : 0)
end