Working with dates

[micred]

Hi everyone,
I am a novice of ruby-hl7 but I was wondering which is the preferred way to work with dates elements.

When saving I can set to DateTime like this:

segment.patient_dob = DateTime.now

but when reading, I get a string:

puts segment.patient_dob 
"20160624155955"

I have to manually convert from String to DateTime everytime. Is it the standard approach?

[micred]

DateTime casting to String is also missing the time zone (%z).

[mogox]

To set the date we are patching Date, Time and DateTime to add the .to_hl7 method:

Time.parse('01:23').to_hl7
=> "20151202012300"
Time.now.to_hl7(3)
=> "20151202153652.302"

There is a comment on this file: https://github.com/ruby-hl7/ruby-hl7/blob/master/lib/core_ext/date_time.rb about adding a method Date.from_hl7( hl7_date ) to return a date from the hl7 format. Feel free to create a PR to solve this method, let me know if you need help with that.