Converting UTC timestamp to ISO 8601 in Ruby
Note: you have to convert (parse) a time string into a time object before you can apply the to_time method.
ruby-1.9.2-p180 :016 > "2010-10-25 23:48:46 UTC".to_time.iso8601
NoMethodError: undefined method `to_time' for "2010-10-25 23:48:46 UTC":String
from (irb):16
Correct procedure:
irb> ut = DateTime.parse("2010-10-25 23:48:46 UTC")
irb> ut.iso8601
=> "2010-10-25T23:48:46+00:00"
After much experimenting, I find the Time library's parser to be better than DateTime, although the reasons escape me at the moment. With that caveat, I always use Time rather than DateTime for this kind of stuff, and the ruby documentation is also difficult to grok as to why this is so,
require 'time'
puts Time.parse("2010-10-25 23:48:46 UTC").iso8601
"2010-10-25T23:48:46Z"
Adding an answer to this super old question because if you're using Rails, there is no need to convert/parse it in the way the other answers here are telling you to do:
- If it's already a timestamp (e.g., a
created_at
orupdated_at
attribute), you can directly call theiso8601
method on that timestamp (e.g.,object.created_at.iso8601
). - The
iso8601
method also accepts a numeric argument to display fractional digits; you would use this if you want2020-04-06T19:16:55.604Z
instead of2020-04-06T19:16:55Z
.
https://api.rubyonrails.org/v5.2.4/classes/ActiveSupport/TimeWithZone.html#method-i-iso8601
I think you're trying to trick us.
The input date to your question is the 25th of October, 2010, whilst the output is the 29th of October, 2010. Well played!
Continuing on this nit-picking thread: your times are also completely different and you're missing the seconds from the output time.
Now for the true answer.
A little factoid first though: the ISO 8601 output in Ruby is similar to the "Combined date and time" output from ISO 8601's Wikipedia page.
You've got a string and so you'll need to convert it into a Time
object which you can do with to_time
. Then it's simply a matter of calling iso8601
on that object to get the ISO 8601 version:
"2010-10-25 23:48:46 UTC".to_time.iso8601
The to_time
method is courtesy of Rails, whilst the iso8601
is courtesy of Ruby's standard library.