Rails age of an article in days?

Question

I need to get the age of the article in days. For example, the article was written on Tue, 01 Apr 2014 18:31:07 EDT -04:00 and now I need the days from that date to now printed as an integer. How can I do so?

This question is similar to [this one](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9572860/rails-count-number-of-days-between-two-dates) which has several answers and a lengthy discussion. — Carlos Ramirez III, Apr 25 '14 at 15:33

Zero Fiber · Answer 1 · 2014-04-25T16:07:38.883

0

With the Date class you can do

(Date.today - @article.created_at.to_date).to_i

to get the number of days between the two dates.

edited Apr 25 '14 at 16:07

answered Apr 25 '14 at 15:31

Zero Fiber

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I removed the to_date and added `60 / 60 / 24` at the end, which did the trick: `(Time.now - @article.created_at) / 60 / 60 / 24` – user3048402 Apr 25 '14 at 15:36
Yes you could do that, but this looks better to me I guess. – Zero Fiber Apr 25 '14 at 15:37
Depending on how old your version of ruby is, this can cause a TypeError (as it tries to subtract a Time from a Date). – Max Williams Apr 25 '14 at 16:00
Edited to use `to_date`. – Zero Fiber Apr 25 '14 at 16:08

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 25 '14 at 15:39

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Please try something like this:

gem install time_diff

install the gem.

require 'time_diff'

time_diff_components = Time.diff(start_date_time, end_date_time)

time_diff_components[:year], time_diff_components[:month], time_diff_components[:week]

This will give more option.

More detail click

answered Apr 25 '14 at 15:39

Jenorish

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is my answer helpful? – Jenorish Apr 26 '14 at 14:59

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 25 '14 at 16:04

This isn't the cleverest way, but it's probably the simplest: use a "magic number": 86400, which is the number of seconds in a day. (you probably already know there are 3600 seconds in an hour, mentally file this number alongside that)

Differences between Time/DateTime objects will be in seconds (as a float). If you divide this by 86400 you get the difference in days, as a float. You can then call to_i on this to get it as an integer if you want.

eg

((Time.now - @article.created_at)/86400).to_i

It's probably worth saving this as a constant, egs SECONDS_IN_A_DAY or something, to avoid mistyping.

Rails age of an article in days?

3 Answers3