Rails Helper to Remove Leading Zero in 12 Hour Time Format

bseanvt — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 23:39:32 +0000

I can’t find a strftime() format that will output the hour without the leading zero. For instance 6:20 will be instead 06:20. This just looks a little sloppy. I created a datetime.rb intializer which will contain custom datetime formats for my application.

# RAILS_ROOT/config/initializers/datetime.rb
Time::DATE_FORMATS[:date] = "%a %b %d, %Y"
Time::DATE_FORMATS[:time] = "%I:%M%p"
# ...

Next I set up a helper function which will string together the :date and :time formats and remove the leading zero in the hour with the .gsub method on the string.

  # RAILS_ROOT/app/helpers/application_helper.rb
  def fulltime(created_at)
    created_at.to_s(:date)+" "+created_at.to_s(:time).gsub(/^0/,'').downcase
  end

In a view I’ll just pass the timestamp to the fulltime function

fulltime(@post.created_at)

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Rails Helper to Remove Leading Zero in 12 Hour Time Format