The Ruby Programming Language

Dates and Times

The Time class represents dates and times. It is a thin layer over the system date and time functionality provided by the operating system. On some platforms, therefore, this class may be unable to represent dates before 1970 or after 2038. The Date and DateTime classes in the standard date library are not constrained in this way, but are not demonstrated here:

# Creating Time objects Time.now # Returns a time object that represents the current time Time.new # A synonym for Time.now Time.local(2007, 7, 8) # July 8, 2007 Time.local(2007, 7, 8, 9, 10) # July 8, 2007, 09:10am, local time Time.utc(2007, 7, 8, 9, 10) # July 8, 2007, 09:10 UTC Time.gm(2007, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11) # July 8, 2007, 09:10:11 GMT (same as UTC) # One microsecond before the new millennium began in London # We'll use this Time object in many examples below. t = Time.utc(2000, 12, 31, 23, 59, 59, 999999) # Components of a Time t.year # => 2000 t.month # => 12: December t.day # => 31 t.wday # => 0: day of week: 0 is Sunday t.yday # => 366: day of year: 2000 was a leap year t.hour # => 23: 24-hour clock t.min # => 59 t.sec # => 59 t.usec # => 999999: microseconds, not milliseconds t.zone # => "UTC": timezone name # Get all components in an array that holds # [sec,min,hour,day,month,year,wday,yday,isdst,zone] # Note that we lose microseconds values = t.to_a # => [59, 59, 23, 31, 12, 2000, 0, 366, false, "UTC"] # Arrays of this form can be passed to Time.local and Time.utc values[5] += 1 # Increment the year ...