3.days.ago, 2.hours.from_now etc without Rails?

Question

Some book mentioned some gem to decorate numbers with #days, #megabytes, #minutes etc. Is this only in ActiveSupport, or is there a smaller gem that provides this functionality for use in (small) non-rails gems? I want to use this functionality as part of a DSL in a tiny little gem.

I like this behavior too, and have often wanted to use it in my non-rails ruby projects. Good question... — jaydel, Jun 21 '11 at 11:37

score 39 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 16 '14 at 14:26

39

I'm not sure if there's another gem available besides ActiveSupport, but it would be really straight-forward to make a small version yourself:

class Fixnum
  SECONDS_IN_DAY = 24 * 60 * 60

  def days
    self * SECONDS_IN_DAY
  end

  def ago
    Time.now - self
  end
end

3.days.ago #=> 2011-06-18 08:45:29 0200

from_now can be implemented like ago but with + self and weeks, hours etc. like days using different constants.

edited Jun 16 '14 at 14:26

Jordan Running

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answered Jun 21 '11 at 06:47

Michael Kohl

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This seems like it may be the way I end up going, thanks. I thought that the Numeric thing had started in somebody else's project and that ActiveSupport just merged it into their own source. I'm probably just imagining it though. – d11wtq Jun 21 '11 at 07:20
1

very nice job!! – Chris Habgood Feb 18 '18 at 00:11

score 9 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 21 '11 at 04:36

9

ActiveSupport has this functionality. It was originally part of Rails but can now be used separately.

answered Jun 21 '11 at 04:36

Jordan Running

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This is correct but also note you can no longer just ```require 'activesupport'```. The OP will need to be a little more explicit about what they want to ```require``` from activesupport. If you just want time you can ```require "active_support/core_ext/numeric/time"``` – Caley Woods Jun 21 '11 at 05:05
I don't really want to depend on all of ActiveSupport for this :) That was sort of what I was trying to avoid. My Gem is just a single class with about 30 lines of code :P But thanks for the confirmation :) – d11wtq Jun 21 '11 at 07:18
@d11wtq then michael kohl's answer would be the way to go. Just extending the fixnum class with something like a ```days``` and ```ago``` method. – Caley Woods Jun 21 '11 at 15:53
10

its `require 'active_support/all'` nowadays – phoet Jan 28 '14 at 21:43

score 3 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 12 '12 at 15:08

3

I found: https://github.com/kylewlacy/timerizer

answered Oct 12 '12 at 15:08

Erik

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Just what I was looking for. Not widely used or mature (most recent release is 0.3.0; 33 stars and 3 forks as I type this), but it _has_ been around a while, and looks to be a drop-in that won't force me to add the ActiveSupport crack pipe to my Hanami project. Thanks. – Jeff Dickey Apr 15 '18 at 17:34

3.days.ago, 2.hours.from_now etc without Rails?

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