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

Ruby's string % operator is too unappreciated and oft forgotten.

"%02d:%02d:%02d:%02d" % [t/86400, t/3600%24, t/60%60, t%60]

Given t is a duration in seconds, this emits a zero-padded colon-separated string including days. Example:

t = 123456
"%02d:%02d:%02d:%02d" % [t/86400, t/3600%24, t/60%60, t%60]
=> "01:10:17:36"

Lovely.