Comments on: The Perfect Timestamp

By: linoj

linoj — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 03:22:05 +0000

Your post inspired me to think of my own holy grail of timestamps. It’s a bit different from yours :)
http://www.vaporbase.com/postings/My_timestamp_holy_grail

By: Trevor

Trevor — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 01:39:26 +0000

Jason, you can check out the app I mentioned (El Dorado) to see how I’m supporting timezones. I’m pretty sure I’m not doing everything 100% right, but I think it’s pretty good for a first try.

http://eldorado.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/app/helpers/application_helper.rb

I removed the stuff dealing with timezones from this post to simplify things. I figure when you’re saving times, you should save them at UTC, and when you’re displaying them, you adjust them and display them to be the user’s local time without displaying the timezone information.

By: Jason Frankovitz

Jason Frankovitz — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 23:14:46 +0000

This is a great effort and addresses a problem I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I don’t see anything about timezone support though – is that a deliberate omission? 3:15 pm in LA is not 3:15pm in Madagascar :)

By: mikkel

mikkel — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 19:35:33 +0000

am/pm means crap to me, we are running 24 hour clocks in my part of the world…

By: Alex

Alex — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 17:09:34 +0000

@RSL:

If you did want periods in your ams and pms, you could put something like:

class Time # or DateTime
alias strftime old_strftime

def strftime(format)
self.old_strftime(format).gsub(/([ap])(m)/i, ‘\1.\2.’)
end
end

in your environment.rb.

Alex

By: Trevor

Trevor — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 16:41:45 +0000

I think you’re right, actually, but I hate the way it looks with periods in there.

Another thing I should have mentioned – what’s up with there being no way to get rid of leading zeros in the hour? That’s why I’m doing the %I.to_i.to_s thing, which seems to be a pretty decent solution.

By: RSL

RSL — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 16:07:44 +0000

“For example, AM and PM always come out in ALL CAPS. Whatâ€™s the deal with that?”

Indeed, what _is_ with that. Your solution is sooooo close but according to most of the style guides I’ve found online [ http://www.google.com/search?q=am+pm+capitalized ] am/pm should contain periods like a.m./p.m. Yes, it’s more than a hair pedantic but what’s the point of this code if not to get things _right_?