Ball, Donald A Jr (Library)
10/22/2007 8:58:00 PM
> -----Original Message-----
> From: jfry [mailto:jeff.fry@gmail.com]
> Sent: Monday, October 22, 2007 2:50 PM
> To: ruby-talk ML
> Subject: More elegant way to condense a date/time string?
>
> Hey all,
>
> I'm a relative ruby beginner, looking to create short-ish
> date/time strings. I came up with:
>
> Time.now.xmlschema.delete(':-').chop.chop.chop.chop #yields
> something like 20071022T123910
>
> Which works for me...but it seemed like I might be doing
> acrobatics to solve a problem that ruby can solve more
> elegantly. I'm mostly just looking for a unique alphanumeric
> string that's not too long. (I chopped the timezone to make
> it a bit shorter.) The particular format I ended up with
> works well for me, but is not a requirement - another option
> I'd be happy with would be seconds (or smaller) since epoch,
> for example.
Look up the ISO-8601 date/time formats, e.g. 1999-01-08 04:05:06
They're standard, unambiguous, and have the handy property that
alphabetical sorting is equivalent to date-order sorting.
- donald