Ruby Time Formatting
The Time class in Ruby has a powerful formatting function which can help you represent the time in a variety of ways. The strftime function is modeled after C’s printf. Here are some usages examples:
t = Time.now
t.strftime("%m/%d/%Y %H:%M:%S") # 07/24/2006 09:09:03
t.strtime("%A") # Monday
t.strftime("%B") # July
You can use the lower case a and b to get the abbreviated name of the weekday and month, respectively. To get the the day of the year, between 1 – 366, use the j option.
t.strftime("%j") # 205
The strftime function is useful when formatting the created_at datetime of your Rails application ActiveRecord models.