From: Gregory Seidman <gsslist+ruby@...>
Date: 2007-10-23T05:25:44+09:00
Subject: Re: More elegant way to condense a date/time string?

On Tue, Oct 23, 2007 at 04:50:07AM +0900, jfry wrote:
> 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.

While #to_i will get you seconds since epoch, you should also be aware of
the #strftime method, which works (nearly?) exactly like the standard C
library call.

> Thanks,
> Jeff
--Greg