where to put time format rules in Rails 3?

Question

I am finding myself repeating typing many strftime which I defined.

Having watch Ryan Bates's railscasts ep 32/33( I think), I created a custom option for the to_s method as in Time.now.to_s, so that I can do Time.now.to_s(:sw), where :sw is my custom method, to retrieve "23 Sep 2010, 5:00PM" for example.

But the problem is, I don't know where to put #sw's definition. Should it be in a file in in the initializer folder? Or should it go in application.rb?

Thanks!

BTW http://strftime.net/ helps a lot – Dorian Dec 30 '17 at 08:58 — Dorian, Dec 30 '17 at 08:58

tee · Answer 1 · 2011-12-16T21:31:39.020

45

Use "time" instead of "date" in your locales file, since Rails timestamps are datetimes.

in config/locales/en.yml

en:
  time:
    formats:
      default: "%Y/%m/%d"
      short: "%b %d"
      long: "%B %d, %Y"

in app/views/posts/show.html.haml

  = l post.updated_at
  = l post.created_at, :format => :long

edited Dec 16 '11 at 21:31

answered Dec 14 '10 at 07:53

tee

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score 22 · Accepted Answer · edited Dec 30 '17 at 08:59

22

I have a file config/initialisers/time_formats.rb containing:

...
Time::DATE_FORMATS[:posts] = "%B %d, %Y"
Time::DATE_FORMATS[:published] = "%B %Y"
...

You just need to restart your server to have the changes picked up.

edited Dec 30 '17 at 08:59

Dorian

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answered Sep 07 '10 at 00:21

Hugo

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Okay, I thought so, too.Also because that way, you get to organize these 'helpers' in files rather than in lines in the application.rb Thanks! – Nik So Sep 07 '10 at 00:27

score 5 · Answer 3 · edited Jul 28 '13 at 13:43

5

Use Rails I18n API.

# config/locales/en.yml
en:
  date:
    formats:
      default: "%Y-%m-%d"
      short: "%b %d"
      long: "%B %d, %Y"

# in views 
= l post.updated_at # will use default format of date in locales yml file

see about I18n API

edited Jul 28 '13 at 13:43

Jeremy Mack

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answered Nov 18 '10 at 08:52

cactis

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score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Mar 29 '14 at 21:12

0

Please read this post:

Rails - to_formatted_s

Create file with name: config/initializers/time_formats.rb

Time::DATE_FORMATS[:my_custom_time_format] = "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M"

And you can use:

formated_date = my_date.to_formatted_s(:my_custom_time_format)

Note: You must to restart your rails server (WEBRick, FCGI, etc)

answered Mar 29 '14 at 21:12

d.danailov

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Ah, I was pulling my hair out trying to figure out why my formats were not changing. Thanks for the server restart tip! – AndrewJM Jun 05 '14 at 20:42

where to put time format rules in Rails 3?

4 Answers4

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