From: jfry <jeff.fry@...>
Date: 2007-10-23T04:50:07+09:00
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.

I ask because I enjoy learning to make my ruby more elegant.

Thanks,
Jeff