Ruby - Datediff??

[vass0922]

I'm trying to find the number of minutes between two different times

Now the catch is, when you go across from monday to tuesday or whatever

I can do the math easy enough from within a day.. but soon as you go across a new day the math gets messed up

tl = Time.now.localtime
tl.day tl.hour tl.min

This will get me the individual numbers.. but not sure how to get what I need

In vbscript there is a DateDiff function that could do it, is there something similiar in Ruby?
I've googled around but not finding much.

[SpookyEddy]

Would something as simple as this work?...

#!/usr/bin/ruby

time1 = Time.now.localtime
sleep(5)
time2 = Time.now.localtime

difftime = time2 - time1

puts "We slept for: " + difftime.to_s + " seconds."

No idea if that will do your day change for you, but worth a shot.

Regards

ed

[vass0922]

Yes that will do what I want, the problem is I'll be putting the time into a text file, and then later the script will run again and the first variable will be the previous time read from the text file

If you syswrite Time.now.localtime it will put the full string "Thu Oct 30 20:23:09 Eastern Standard Time 2003"
... or I can use Time.now.localtime.to_i and convert it to an int.. but how do you convert that to a time object?

I guess I could try something like


time1 = Time.now.localtime.to_i
sleep(5)
time2 = Time.now.localtime.to_i

then divide that number by 60 to get the minutes...

I do believe that does the day as well, as Time.now.localtime uses the full time string

That may work!
knew it had to be easy, I just gotta learn to think in Ruby

[SpookyEddy]

I just checked, it does the day as well.

[SpookyEddy]

On a related note, if I ever want to log to a file or anything similar I tend to just use the YAML module. That way I can record my log entries in a way that I can easily pass back into my code later but is still human readable.

To give you an idea what I am rambling about heres some sketchy code.

#!/usr/bin/ruby

require 'yaml'

def log(log_entry)
    log_time = Time.now.localtime
    log_hash = { log_time => log_entry }

    File.open("log.txt", "a") do
        |file|
        file.puts log_hash.to_yaml
    end
end

log("foo")
sleep(2)
log("bar")

Resulting in a log.txt that looks like so...

ed@Slacker:~/ruby$ cat log.txt 
--- 
2003-10-31 15:57:12.436763 +00:00: foo
--- 
2003-10-31 15:57:14.437038 +00:00: bar

Just an idea anyway

<edit>
I can't even see my own post as its been eaten.
/me shakes fist at the stupid cache system.
</edit>

Later

ed

[vass0922]

Interesting
I will take a better look at it later... thinking I'm going back to bed

Was checking it out on CPAN, that maybe useful indeed

Thanks again!!

--- edit ---
No worries, I can see the post and the edit

[SpookyEddy]

no problem.

It started me thinking about writing a Log class based on the same idea but with additional methods like append, rotate, validate etc for general logging and log maintenance. Hmm or perhaps a sub class of File or something similar.

I have plenty of beer so who knows, I may even write some code this evening

Regards

ed

[pedantic]

http://jakarta.apache.org/log4j/docs/