The Ruby Way: Solutions and Techniques in Ruby Programming, Second Edition

7.3. Determining the Day of the Week

There are several ways to determine the day of the week. First, the instance method to_a returns an array of time information. You can access the seventh element, which is a number from 0 to 6 (0 meaning Sunday and 6 meaning Saturday).

time = Time.now
day = time.to_a[6]            # 2 (meaning Tuesday)

It’s better to use the instance method wday as shown here:

day = time.wday               # 2 (meaning Tuesday)

But both these techniques are a little cumbersome. Sometimes we want the value coded as a number, but more often we don’t. To get the actual name of the weekday as a string, we can use the strftime method. This name will be familiar to C programmers. There are nearly two dozen different specifiers that it recognizes, enabling ...