How can I remove the zone from a DateTime value?

Question

I have this DateTime:

=> Fri, 03 Feb 2012 11:52:42 -0500

How can I remove the zone(-0500) in ruby? I just want something like this:

Answer 1

In addition to the accepted answer you can also add the same strftime parameters to DATE_FORMATS a Rails hash allowing you to standardise output formats in your application.

In config/initializers/datetime_formats.rb:

Time::DATE_FORMATS[:nozone] = '%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S'

Then in your code you could do:

Time.zone.now.to_s(:nozone)

You could even make it the default:

Time::DATE_FORMATS[:default] = '%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S'
Time.zone.now.to_s

There is also a separate hash for dates:

Date::DATE_FORMATS[:default] = '%a, %d %b %Y'

This feature has been around for years but appears to be little known.

Answer 2

When all else fails

zoned_time = Time.now
unzoned_time = Time.new(zoned_time.year, zoned_time.month, zoned_time.day, zoned_time.hour, zoned_time.min, zoned_time.sec, "+00:00")

Answer 3

Time always has a zone (it has no meaning without one). You can choose to ignore it when printing by using DateTime#strftime:

now = DateTime.now
puts now
#=> 2012-02-03T10:01:24-07:00

puts now.strftime('%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S')
#=> Fri, 03 Feb 2012 10:01:24

See Time#strftime for the arcane codes used to construct a particular format.

Alternatively, you may wish to convert your DateTime to UTC for a more general representation.