Ruby: intersection between two ranges

Question

In ruby, given two date ranges, I want the range that represents the intersection of the two date ranges, or nil if no intersection. For example:

(Date.new(2011,1,1)..Date.new(2011,1,15)) & (Date.new(2011,1,10)..Date.new(2011,2,15))
=> Mon, 10 Jan 2011..Sat, 15 Jan 2011

Edit: Should have said that I want it to work for DateTime as well, so interval can be down to mins and secs:

(DateTime.new(2011,1,1,22,45)..Date.new(2011,2,15)) & (Date.new(2011,1,1)..Date.new(2011,2,15))
=> Sat, 01 Jan 2011 22:45:00 +0000..Tue, 15 Feb 2011

Answer 1

require 'date'

class Range
  def intersection(other)
    return nil if (self.max < other.begin or other.max < self.begin) 
    [self.begin, other.begin].max..[self.max, other.max].min
  end
  alias_method :&, :intersection
end

p (Date.new(2011,1,1)..Date.new(2011,1,15)) & (Date.new(2011,1,10)..Date.new(2011,2,15))
#<Date: 2011-01-10 ((2455572j,0s,0n),+0s,2299161j)>..#<Date: 2011-01-15 ((2455577j,0s,0n),+0s,2299161j)>

Answer 2

Since this question is related to How to combine overlapping time ranges (time ranges union), I also wanted to post my finding of the gem range_operators here, because if helped me in the same situation.