In Ruby, you have to format or convert time from one format to other many a times. You can use library method strftime available to perform formatting operations.

Syntax of strftime: strftime( format )

Returns: Result in requested format

First of all, let us create a new variable in which we get current time to be formatted in various formats,

t = Time.now
=> 2013-09-12 22:49:27 +0530

Now, we have variable t holding current time value, now below are the examples of,

Most Commonly used formats

These are the almost all formats that are required.

Combinations:

You can try these formats in combination too,

For example,

t.strftime("%H:%M:%S")

 => “22:49:27”

Code to print all formats

# Function to print strftime results
def print_strftime_formats(a,cur_date)
 a.each do |format|
   b = "%#{format}"
   output = cur_date.strftime(b)
   puts "t.strftime('#{b}'), => #{output}"
 end
end

a = ('a'..'z').to_a
A = ('A'..'Z').to_acur_date = Time.now

# calling and printing strftime results on current date

puts "DateTime: #{cur_date}n"

puts "nnFor a to z"
print_strftime_formats(a,cur_date)

puts "nnFor A to Z"
print_strftime_formats(A,cur_date)

You can refer code at Github OR download this code.

The output of the above code is given below for the reference:

For ‘a’ to ‘z’

For ‘A’ to ‘Z’

So, you can tweak your format as output required for your purpose. I guess, Formatting of time is easy for you now.