Rails formatting date

Question

I am posting a date to an API and the required format is as follows:

2014-12-01T01:29:18

I can get the date from the model like so:

Model.created_at.to_s

That returns:

2014-12-01 01:29:18 -0500

How can I use Rails or Ruby to format it like the required format with the T and removing the -0500?

Answer 1

Use

Model.created_at.strftime("%FT%T")

where,

%F - The ISO 8601 date format (%Y-%m-%d)
%T - 24-hour time (%H:%M:%S)

Following are some of the frequently used useful list of Date and Time formats that you could specify in strftime method:

Date (Year, Month, Day):
  %Y - Year with century (can be negative, 4 digits at least)
          -0001, 0000, 1995, 2009, 14292, etc.
  %C - year / 100 (round down.  20 in 2009)
  %y - year % 100 (00..99)

  %m - Month of the year, zero-padded (01..12)
          %_m  blank-padded ( 1..12)
          %-m  no-padded (1..12)
  %B - The full month name (``January'')
          %^B  uppercased (``JANUARY'')
  %b - The abbreviated month name (``Jan'')
          %^b  uppercased (``JAN'')
  %h - Equivalent to %b

  %d - Day of the month, zero-padded (01..31)
          %-d  no-padded (1..31)
  %e - Day of the month, blank-padded ( 1..31)

  %j - Day of the year (001..366)

Time (Hour, Minute, Second, Subsecond):
  %H - Hour of the day, 24-hour clock, zero-padded (00..23)
  %k - Hour of the day, 24-hour clock, blank-padded ( 0..23)
  %I - Hour of the day, 12-hour clock, zero-padded (01..12)
  %l - Hour of the day, 12-hour clock, blank-padded ( 1..12)
  %P - Meridian indicator, lowercase (``am'' or ``pm'')
  %p - Meridian indicator, uppercase (``AM'' or ``PM'')

  %M - Minute of the hour (00..59)

  %S - Second of the minute (00..59)

  %L - Millisecond of the second (000..999)
  %N - Fractional seconds digits, default is 9 digits (nanosecond)
          %3N  millisecond (3 digits)
          %6N  microsecond (6 digits)
          %9N  nanosecond (9 digits)
          %12N picosecond (12 digits)

For the complete list of formats for strftime method please visit APIDock