{"id":223,"date":"2010-10-07T14:18:24","date_gmt":"2010-10-07T14:18:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nicholshayes.co.uk\/blog\/?p=223"},"modified":"2015-03-02T11:23:33","modified_gmt":"2015-03-02T11:23:33","slug":"time-format","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nicholshayes.co.uk\/blog\/?p=223","title":{"rendered":"Time format"},"content":{"rendered":"

I found an interesting article by Todd Sayre<\/a> on time formats in Rails. It is only short, but interesting. Based on that I created config\/initializers\/time_formats.rb in my latest app:<\/p>\n

# Used to create time and datetime formatting short cuts. Search for to_formatted_s in the api<\/span>
\n# Also see http:\/\/snippets.dzone.com\/posts\/show\/2406<\/span>
\n
\n# If date = Time.local(2009,12,24,15,30,27)<\/span>
\n
\nTime<\/span>::DATE_FORMATS[<\/span>:datetime<\/span>]<\/span> = "%d-%b-%Y %H:%M"<\/span>  # date.to_s(:datetime)  ---->  24-Dec-2009 15:30<\/span>
\nTime<\/span>::DATE_FORMATS[<\/span>:date<\/span>]<\/span> = "%d-%b-%Y"<\/span>            # date.to_s(:date)      ---->  24-Dec-2009<\/span>
\nTime<\/span>::DATE_FORMATS[<\/span>:time<\/span>]<\/span> = "%H:%M"<\/span>               # date.to_s(:time)      ---->  15:30<\/span>
\nTime<\/span>::DATE_FORMATS[<\/span>:default<\/span>]<\/span> = Time<\/span>::DATE_FORMATS[<\/span>:datetime<\/span>]<\/span>   # Sets default behaviour for date.to_s<\/span><\/div><\/div>\n

I think the code speaks for itself. As you can see it is very easy to extend Time#to_s to provide straight forward formatting. It is also easy to overwrite the default<\/p>\n

Update<\/h3>\n

Note that the previous format only affected Time objects. Date object text formats have to be defined separately. However, if you want the two to share a common format, this is a useful technique:<\/p>\n

date_formats = {<\/span>
\n  concise: '%d-%b-%Y'<\/span> # 13-Jan-2014<\/span>
\n}<\/span>
\n
\nTime<\/span>::DATE_FORMATS.merge<\/span>! date_formats
\nDate<\/span>::DATE_FORMATS.merge<\/span>! date_formats<\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I found an interesting article by Todd Sayre on time formats in Rails. It is only short, but interesting. Based on that I created config\/initializers\/time_formats.rb in my latest app: # Used to create time and datetime formatting short cuts. Search … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicholshayes.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicholshayes.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicholshayes.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicholshayes.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicholshayes.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=223"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/nicholshayes.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":523,"href":"http:\/\/nicholshayes.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223\/revisions\/523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicholshayes.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicholshayes.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicholshayes.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}