The bar codes on paper or electronic boarding passes contain a good deal of data about a given flight. One of my goals for Flight Historian is to allow me to add a new flight by scanning the bar code, but in order to do that, I need to write a Ruby parser for the data in these boarding passes. This parser will accept bar code data, and return a collection of field names, values, and its interpretation of what those values mean.
One of the more difficult challenges I’m running into, though, is interpreting the date of the flight from the bar code.
