EZTime is a simple extension to the Date class in Ruby to provide easy
formatting of dates and times.
EZTime has a number of formatting features not available to strftime.
For example, what if you want to display the ordinal (st, nd, rd, th)
for a date? (i.e. 1st, 2nd, etc.) With EZTime, ordinals are easy.
How about displaying the meridian (AM/PM) in lowercase? What about
only displaying the first letter (a/p)? While strftime is powerful,
there are simply some formatting options not available, which is a
shame.
EZTime is much easier to use than strftime because it doesn’t require
much memorization. For example, isn’t :month/:day/:year easier than
%m/%d/%Y ?
Not convinced? How about :day:ordinal of :month_name, :year
(i.e. 20th of December, 2003).
Perhaps the strongest feature of EZTime is that it can be “extended” by simply
adding new methods to the EZTime module. The reason this works is because EZTime
eval’s the formatting string after a simple substitution, replacing the :name
with a method call to that name. The upside to this is that everything you put
in the formatting string can be accessed by itself as a method call.
Certain methods have one or more variants, all following a standard convention:
- ‘z’: (prefix) element will include a leading 0 digit
- ‘l’: (prefix) (lowercase L): element will be converted to all lowercase
- ‘s’: (prefix) small variants. For example, smeridian will return ‘A’ or ‘P’
- ‘12’: (suffix): element will be in 12-hour format
See the documentation for the various methods for examples of these modifiers.
Currently, using quotes or apostrophes in an EZTime format string is not supported –
it results in compile errors. If there is a need for either of these characters,
however, I will look into correcting the situation.
EZTime was created by Chris Scharf (http://tiny.scharfie.com)