Subtract dates in Ruby and get the difference in minutes

Question

how do i subtract two different UTC dates in Ruby and then get the difference in minutes?

Thanks

Answer 1

If you subtract two Date or DateTime objects, the result is a Rational representing the number of days between them. What you need is:

a = Date.new(2009, 10, 13) - Date.new(2009, 10, 11) (a * 24 * 60).to_i   # 2880 minutes 

or

a = DateTime.new(2009, 10, 13, 12, 0, 0) - DateTime.new(2009, 10, 11, 0, 0, 0) (a * 24 * 60).to_i   # 3600 minutes