[Rails] Converting time retrieved from MySQL (part 2)

[Ara.T.Howard]

On Wed, 9 Mar 2005, Nathan Wright wrote:

> Sorry for taking so long to check out everyone's suggestions, but here's what 
> I've found out:
>
> I'm accessing the time from the MySQL database with this query 
> "comment.created_on".
>
> By checking the class of this query with "comment.created_on.class" I've
> found out that this is, in fact, returning a Time object. (neat trick by the
> way!)
>
> When I attempt to apply any "time" methods to this object (for instance,
> "comment.created_on.strftime_("%A")") I get the following error:

what's with the underscore?

>    undefined method `strftime' for nil:NilClass

you can also render this (another neat trick):

   comment.created_on.methods.inspect

or even

   comment.created_on.class.instance_methods.inspect

if you see 'strftime' in there you are doing something strange.  of course you
can always ask the object too by rendering the output of

   comment.created_on.repspond_to? 'strftime'

>
> Does anyone have an idea of what I'm doing wrong (likely), or is this a 
> problem with Rails (unlikely)?
>
>
> ---------------------------
> Original Problem (If you're joining us late in the game):
> ---------------------------
> I'm having a problem converting a date retrieved from my MySQL database and 
> I'm hoping someone can help.
>
> MySQL stores the date/time as this:
>
>    2005-03-08 17:00:34.0
>
> and according to my Pickaxe book Ruby stores times as "the number of seconds 
> and microseconds since [...] January 1, 1970". All well and
> good. Unfortunately, RoR is converting my date to this:
>
>    Tue Mar 08 17:00:34 MST 2005
>
> which, as far as I can tell, is as string representation of the date; as 
> such, I can't perform any date operations on it (strftime, etc).
>
> My question has two parts:
> 1) Can some sort of date operation be brought to bear on RoR's internal date 
> format to make it compatible with standard Ruby date
> operations?
> 2) If not, is there some way to turn off RoR's parsing of the date returned 
> from the MySQL query?
>
>
> -- 
> Nathan Wright
> http://www.brandalism.com
> _______________________________________________
> Rails mailing list
> Rails at lists.rubyonrails.org
> http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails
>

-a
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