From: Robert Klemme <bob.news@...>
Date: 2005-09-27T04:41:42+09:00
Subject: Re: Time interval

Daniel Berger <Daniel.Berger@qwest.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I was just wondering if anyone has implemented an "Interval" class of
> some sort out there, i.e. something that would give you the years,
> months, days, hours, minutes and seconds between two fixed DateTime
> objects, rather than an absolute date.

Note that it's easy to output difference in seconds, minutes, hours, days 
and weeks but then it starts to get more difficult.

I once cooked up something albeit in Java that takes two arrays (an array 
with factors and an array with unit names) and a value and constructs a 
string from that.  Untested:

def create_units(val, factors, units)
  raise "mismatch" unless factors.size == units.size

  r = []

  factors.zip(units) do |f,u|
    v = val % f
    r << "#{val} #{v}" if v != 0
    val = (val - v) / f
  end

  r.reverse!
  r.join " "
end

Kind regards

    robert