Convert duration to hours:minutes:seconds (or similar) in Rails 3 or Ruby

Question

I have a feeling there is a simple/built-in way to do this but I can\'t find it.

I have a duration (in seconds) in an integer and I want to display it in a friendly form

Answer 1

    hours = 3.5456
    value = (hours*60).divmod(60).map{ |a| "%02d"%[a.floor] }.join(":")
    => "03:32"

Answer 2

ActiveSupport::Duration.build + inspect gives you valid results

 >> ActiveSupport::Duration.build(125557).inspect
 => "1 day, 10 hours, 52 minutes, and 37 seconds"

Answer 3

I guess you could do also something like:

(Time.mktime(0)+3600).strftime("%H:%M:%S")

To format it as you wish.

BTW, originally I thought of using Time.at() but seems that EPOCH time on my Ubuntu is Thu Jan 01 01:00:00 +0100 1970 and not 00:00:00 hours as I expected, and therefore if I do:

Time.at(3600).strftime("%H:%M:%S")

Gives me 1 hour more than wanted.

Answer 4

See: http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/DateHelper.html

distance_of_time_in_words(3600)
 => "about 1 hour"

Answer 5

Shout out to @joshuapinter who gave the best answer (in the form of a comment).

Use the drop-in replacement dotiw gem to gain more control over the accuracy of the output to suit different needs:

https://github.com/radar/distance_of_time_in_words

Sample view code:

%label
  Logoff after:
  - expire_in = distance_of_time_in_words(Time.now, Time.now + user.custom_timeout.minutes, :only => [:minutes, :hours, :days])
  = expire_in

Resulting in something like this:

Logoff after: 1 day, 13 hours, and 20 minutes

Answer 6

This one uses the obscure divmod method to divide and modulo at the same time, so it handles Float seconds properly:

def duration(seconds)
  minutes, seconds = seconds.divmod(60)
  hours, minutes = minutes.divmod(60)
  days, hours = hours.divmod(24)

  "#{days.to_s.rjust(3)}d #{hours.to_s.rjust(2)}h #{minutes.to_s.rjust(2)}m #{seconds}s"
end