If storing duration as integer seconds... question on building a helper

rubyonrails-talk
1

Ok, I'm new to rails (and Ruby)...

I'm trying to figure out the best practice for handling a duration field (for example "time it takes someone to run a mile." )

All I care about is seconds (not milliseconds) so figured I'd store the field as an integer.

I want to allow the user to enter in the time manually as:

//1 minute 5 seconds: 1:05 OR 01:05

//2 hours 4 minutes 6 seconds: 2:04:06 OR 02:04:06

I have a helper that will convert seconds to a time display as:

def seconds_to_time seconds      Time.at(seconds).gmtime.strftime('%R:%S') end

But how should I handle the conversion the other way around from the input (ie convert 01:35 to seconds?) Do I need to do some complex parsing of the String itself parsing out : (remember it could be xx:xx:xx or just xx:xx ) or can I somehow leverage Time.parse ?

I would think this would come up quite often so there must be a best practice or easy way to handle this kind of thing.

Thanks in advance

2

I currently decided to just use something like:

def time_to_seconds time_display      time = time_display.split(":")      seconds = 0      modifiers = [ 1, 60, 360 ]      time.each_with_index do | t, i |         seconds = seconds + ( t.to_i * modifiers[time.length -1 - i] )      end      return seconds   end

3

I currently decided to just use something like:

def time_to_seconds time_display     time = time_display.split(":")     seconds = 0     modifiers = [ 1, 60, 360 ]     time.each_with_index do | t, i |        seconds = seconds + ( t.to_i * modifiers[time.length -1 - i] )     end     return seconds end

If you're just looking for a quick way to convert from hh:mm:ss to
seconds, how about:

time_string.split(':').inject(0){|a, m| a = a * 60 + m.to_i}

This presumes that the smallest increment in the string is seconds,
and the largest hours. However, that is how you described the problem.

WDYT?

4

Wow! That looks awesome. I'm new to ruby so just looked into the inject method. I'll test it shortly.

Thanks a lot. (It looks like it should work if you provided just minutes and seconds 10:04 or hours:min:sec 1:14:05 )