From: "Ball, Donald A Jr (Library)" <donald.ball@...>
Date: 2007-10-23T05:57:38+09:00
Subject: Re: More elegant way to condense a date/time string?

> -----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