Timezone?

ruby-talk
1

Hello everyone!

I have a question :slight_smile:

When I run this command :
puts Time.now
I got => 2009-02-18T14:31:17-08:00

But if then I do this :
require 'date'; expiration_date = DateTime.new(2008, 02, 18, 12, 12,
13); puts expiration_date
I got => 2008-02-18T12:12:13+00:00

My question is : What is the "-08:00" ? I assume it's the timezone? Then
how to set my expiration_date variable to have the same timezone?

Thank you!

···

--
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

2

DateTime.new is an alias for DateTime.civil. You can see its
documentation here: http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/date/rdoc/classes/DateTime.html#M000400

You're right that "-08:00" is something like a timezone. It's the
offset from UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) and it's determined by
your timezone. Anyway, as you can see in the documentation, there's
an extra argument after the one for seconds where you can set your
offset. It's set as a fraction of a day, so in your case you'd want
to do something like this:

expiration_date = DateTime.new(2008, 02, 18, 12, 12, 13, -8/24.0)

HTH,
Chris

···

On Feb 18, 3:33 pm, Guillaume Loader <picpi...@hotmail.com> wrote:

Hello everyone!

I have a question :slight_smile:

When I run this command :
puts Time.now
I got => 2009-02-18T14:31:17-08:00

But if then I do this :
require 'date'; expiration_date = DateTime.new(2008, 02, 18, 12, 12,
13); puts expiration_date
I got => 2008-02-18T12:12:13+00:00

My question is : What is the "-08:00" ? I assume it's the timezone? Then
how to set my expiration_date variable to have the same timezone?

Thank you!
--
Posted viahttp://www.ruby-forum.com/.

3

Perfect!
By the waym why -8/24.0 instead of -8/24 ?
Thank you!

···

--
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

4

Fire up an instance of irb and see for yourself.
Nah: if you did -8/24 it would return -1 instead of -0.33~
That's because arithmethic operations always return a value as precise
as the precisest one in the term, which in this case is an Integer, no
floating point number.

···

On [Thu, 19.02.2009 08:29], Guillaume Loader wrote:

By the waym why -8/24.0 instead of -8/24 ?

--
Dominik Honnef
dominikho@gmx.net

5

Thanks for the reply! I got it!

···

--
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.