Comments on: Ruby Time Functions Rock!!

By: Mully

Mully — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 05:24:07 +0000

You may already know this, but you could replace your own array of month abbreviations with the Date module’s ABBR_MONTHNAMES constant…

require ‘date’
months = Date::ABBR_MONTHNAMES

The first element is ‘nil’, resulting in the index matching the month numbers (1 = ‘Jan’, etc.). I frequently work with this array and have found this constant handy.

By: Scott Rutherford

Scott Rutherford — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 05:24:07 +0000

Hi Mully, cheers for that. I have to admit I didn’t know, but I do now. That makes it even neater:



labels = []

0.upto(5) do |x|

  labels.unshift(Date::ABBR_MONTHNAMES[Time.now.months_ago(x).month])

end

Thanks, Scott.

By: Blake

Blake — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 05:24:07 +0000

http://chronic.rubyforge.org/

I’ve been using this to spice time handling up a bit. Pretty cool stuff.

By: Scott Rutherford

Scott Rutherford — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 05:24:07 +0000

Hi Blake, Yep I’ve had a little play with chronic, seems to be great with certain stuff (‘in an hour’, ‘yesterday’, etc) but not so good for things like ‘the first day of next month’, ‘the first day of last month’. But still a great idea. I need to use it more to understand how to get the best out of it I think.

Cheers
Scott.

By: Erik Kastner

Erik Kastner — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 05:24:07 +0000

Hey, you are sitting next to me at FoWA. Here’s a more idiomatic way of doing the same thing:
(0..5).collect {|months_ago| Time.now.months_ago(months_ago).strftime("%b") }.reverse