Represent a time with no date in ruby

Question

Is there a way to represent a time in ruby without having a Date attached? I am doing a timetracking application and I only need in/out times, there is a separate column for date.

The MySQL TIME data type stores only the time, but in Rails it comes back as Jan 1 2000 + what ever time is there.

Should i just ignore the date part, or is there a way to eliminate it?

Answer 1

We just store times with no attached dates as minutes since midnight in an integer column (that's Postgres not MySQL but nonetheless). Maybe that approach can work for you too?

Answer 2

There's no way to eliminate it, because:

Time is stored internally as the number of seconds with fraction since the Epoch, January 1, 1970 00:00 UTC.

Just format it like this:

t = Time.now
t.strftime("at %I:%M%p")