Index:

at gm local mktime new now times utc + -- <=> asctime ctime day gmt? gmtime hour isdst localtime mday min mon month sec strftime to_a to_f to_i to_s tv_sec tv_usec usec utc utc? wday yday year zone

---

Time is an abstraction of dates and times. Time is stored internally as the number of seconds and microseconds since the epoch, January 1, 1970 00:00 UTC. Also see the library modules Date and ParseDate, documented beginning on pages 439 and 453, respectively. The Time class treats GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) and UTC (Coordinated Universal Time)[Yes, UTC really does stand for Coordinated Universal Time. There was a committee involved.] as equivalent. GMT is the older way of referring to these baseline times but persists in the names of calls on Posix systems. All times are stored with some number of microseconds. Be aware of this fact when comparing times with each other---times that are apparently equal when displayed may be different when compared. Creates a new time object with the value given by aTime, or the given number of seconds (and optional microseconds) from epoch. Creates a time based on given values, interpreted as UTC (GMT). The year must be specified. Other values default to the minimum value for that field (and may be nil or omitted). Months may be specified by numbers from 1 to 12, or by the three-letter English month names. Hours are specified on a 24-hour clock (0..23). Raises an ArgumentError if any values are out of range. Will also accept ten arguments in the order output by Time#to_a . Same as Time.gm , but interprets the values in the local time zone. Synonym for Time.local . Returns a Time object initialized to the current system time. Note: The object created will be created using the resolution available on your system clock, and so may include fractional seconds. Synonym for Time.new . Returns a Tms structure (see Struct::Tms on page 383) that contains user and system CPU times for this process. Synonym for Time.gm . Addition---Adds some number of seconds (possibly fractional) to time and returns that value as a new time. Difference---Returns a new time that represents the difference between two times, or subtracts the given number of seconds in aNumeric from time. Comparison---Compares time with anOtherTime or with aNumeric, which is the number of seconds (possibly fractional) since epoch. Returns a canonical string representation of time. Synonym for Time#asctime . Returns the day of the month (1..n) for time. Returns true if time represents a time in UTC (GMT). Converts time to UTC (GMT), modifying the receiver. Returns the hour of the day (0..23) for time. Returns true if time occurs during Daylight Saving Time in its time zone. Converts time to local time (using the local time zone in effect for this process) modifying the receiver. Synonym for Time#day . Returns the minute of the hour (0..59) for time. Returns the month of the year (1..12) for time. Synonym for Time#mon . Returns the second of the minute (0..60)[Yes, seconds really can range from zero to 60. This allows the system to inject leap seconds every now and then to correct for the fact that years are not really a convenient number of hours long.] for time. Formats time according to the directives in the given format string. See Table 22.9 on page 397 for the available values. Any text not listed as a directive will be passed through to the output string. Returns a ten-element anArray of values for time: {[ sec, min, hour, day, month, year, wday, yday, isdst, zone ]}. See the individual methods for an explanation of the valid ranges of each value. The ten elements can be passed directly to Time.utc or Time.local to create a new Time. Returns the value of time as a floating point number of seconds since epoch. Returns the value of time as an integer number of seconds since epoch. Returns a string representing time. Equivalent to calling Time#strftime with a format string of ``%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %Z %Y''. Synonym for Time#to_i . Synonym for Time#usec . Returns just the number of microseconds for time. Synonym for Time#gmtime . Returns true if time represents a time in UTC (GMT). Returns an integer representing the day of the week, 0..6, with Sunday == 0. Returns an integer representing the day of the year, 1..366. Returns the year for time (including the century). Returns the name of the time zone used for time.

---

Extracted from the book "Programming Ruby - The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide"
Copyright © 2001 by Addison Wesley Longman, Inc. This material may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the Open Publication License, v1.0 or later (the latest version is presently available at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/)). Distribution of substantively modified versions of this document is prohibited without the explicit permission of the copyright holder. Distribution of the work or derivative of the work in any standard (paper) book form is prohibited unless prior permission is obtained from the copyright holder.