We have to handle user specified date formats in our application. We decided to go with Date.strptime for parsing and validation, which works great, except for how it just ignores any garbage data entered. Here is an irb session demonstrating the issue

ree-1.8.7-2010.01 > require 'date'
 => true 
ree-1.8.7-2010.01 > d = Date.strptime '2001-01-01failfailfail', '%Y-%m-%d'
 => #<Date: 4903821/2,0,2299161> 
ree-1.8.7-2010.01 > d.to_s
 => "2001-01-01" 

what we would like, is behavior more like this

ree-1.8.7-2010.01 > d = Date.strptime '2001failfailfail-01-01', '%Y-%m-%d'
ArgumentError: invalid date

Any suggestions would be appreciated