CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby
Joe Essey
Joe Essey

Reputation: 3538

How to split a string some number of characters before end of line?

I would like to split strings like "12:30am" and "6:55pm" and separate the am/pm from the time. Is there a way to use String#split to do that?

Alternatively, is there a better way to turn that string in to a Time object?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 60

Answers (2)

sawa
sawa

Reputation: 168259

You don't need to do anything special. All you need to do is use the "time" library.

require "time"
Time.parse "12:30am"
# => 2014-05-04 00:30:00 +0900
Time.parse "6:55pm"
# => 2014-05-04 18:55:00 +0900

Upvotes: 2

tsiege
tsiege

Reputation: 507

You could do something like Time.parse("12:00am".gsub(/am|pm/i, "")) to get any of those endings off. The gsub will remove those characters based on the /am|pm/i regex. The pipe being an or and the i makes it case insensitive. Check out rubular for help using gsub or any regex in ruby.

As for better time methods, I would recommend trying the gem chronic for more flexible, expressive time methods. Here are some examples from its documentation.

require 'chronic'

Time.now   #=> Sun Aug 27 23:18:25 PDT 2006

Chronic.parse('tomorrow')
  #=> Mon Aug 28 12:00:00 PDT 2006

Chronic.parse('monday', :context => :past)
  #=> Mon Aug 21 12:00:00 PDT 2006

Chronic.parse('this tuesday 5:00')
  #=> Tue Aug 29 17:00:00 PDT 2006

Chronic.parse('this tuesday 5:00', :ambiguous_time_range => :none)
  #=> Tue Aug 29 05:00:00 PDT 2006

Chronic.parse('may 27th', :now => Time.local(2000, 1, 1))
  #=> Sat May 27 12:00:00 PDT 2000

Chronic.parse('may 27th', :guess => false)
  #=> Sun May 27 00:00:00 PDT 2007..Mon May 28 00:00:00 PDT 2007

Chronic.parse('6/4/2012', :endian_precedence => :little)
  #=> Fri Apr 06 00:00:00 PDT 2012

Chronic.parse('INVALID DATE')
  #=> nil

Upvotes: 1

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