11 May, 2009

Published at 10:14PM

Tagged with date, programming, rails, ruby, time, and tips

This post has 1 comment

Rails Time/Date formatting with lambda

By now, most people using Rails are aware that you can do things like this to conveniently format time:

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# config/initializers/date_time_formats.rb
Time::DATE_FORMATS.merge!(
  :full => '%B %d, %Y at %I:%M %p',
  :md => '%m/%d',
  :mdy => '%m/%d/%y',
  :time => '%I:%M %p'
)

Then you can do things like Time.now.to_s(:full) and so on. Nice and DRY. But what if you needed to apply a little bit of logic to determine how to represent your date/time? Well, you can do that pretty easily using lambda:

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Time::DATE_FORMATS.merge!(
  :friendly => lambda { |time|
    if time.year == Time.now.year
      time.strftime "%b #{time.day.ordinalize}"
    else
      time.strftime "%b #{time.day.ordinalize}, %Y"
    end
  }
)

Pretty handy. This may be common knowledge to all of you Rails experts, but I didn’t realize this for a while, and I thought it was worth mentioning.

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Comments

Topher Fangio Friday, 13 Nov, 2009 Posted at 11:21AM

This is awesome! I actually didn’t even know how to do the original merge, the lambda just makes it awesome :-)

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