From: Robert Klemme <shortcutter@...>
Date: 2007-10-23T16:00:45+09:00
Subject: Re: More elegant way to condense a date/time string?

2007/10/22, jfry <jeff.fry@gmail.com>:
> 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.

The proper way to achieve your format would probably be this:

irb(main):015:0> Time.now.strftime "%Y%m%dT%H%M%S"
=> "20071023T085747"

Kind regards

robert