Transforming Datetime into month, day and year?

Question

I can't seem to find this and I feel like it should be easy. In Ruby on Rails, how do I take:

2010-06-14 19:01:00 UTC

and turn it into

June 14th, 2010

Can I not just use a helper in the view?

Answer 1

I don't know for

June 14th, 2010

But if you want

June 14, 2010

Ref how do i get name of the month in ruby on Rails? or this

Just do

@date = Time.now
@date.strftime("%B %d, %Y")

And for suffix use following

@date.strftime("%B #{@date.day.ordinalize}, %Y") # >>> Gives `June 18th, 2010`

Answer 2

For future reference: http://onrails.org/articles/2008/08/20/what-are-all-the-rails-date-formats

Answer 3

Don't forget, ruby is on rails :D

http://ruby-doc.org/core/classes/Time.html#M000298

Answer 4

Just the other day there was a similar question. In my answer http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3022163/how-do-i-get-name-of-the-month-in-ruby-on-rails/3022466#3022466 I showed how you can add a custom to_s definition in your config/environment.rb file.

ActiveSupport::CoreExtensions::Time::Conversions::DATE_FORMATS.merge!(
 :my_own_long_date_format => "%B %d, %Y")

Now you can call Time.now.to_s(:my_own_long_date_format) from any view to get:

June 15, 2010

Answer 5

Needs the Time module for Time.parse and ActiveSupport for Integer#ordinalize:

require 'time'
require 'active_support'

input = '2010-06-14 19:01:00 UTC'
t = Time.parse(input)
date = "%s %s, %d" % [t.strftime("%B"), t.day.ordinalize, t.year]
# => "June 14th, 2010"