Ruby Rails converting a Date to a UNIX timestamp

Question

How would I get a UNIX timestamp  number of seconds since 1970 GMT  from a Date object in a Rails app   I know Time to i returns a timestamp  but doing Date to time and then getting the timestamp results in something that s off by about a month  not sure why        Any help is appreciated  thanks   Edit  OK  I think I figured it out- I was processing a date several times in a loop  and each time the date was moved a little because of a time zone mismatch  ultimately leading to my timestamp being a month off  Still  I d be interested in knowing if there s any way to do this without relying on Date to time

User · Answer

Solution for Ruby 1 8 when you have an arbitrary DateTime object   1 8 7-p374  001  gt  require  date     gt  true  1 8 7-p374  002  gt  DateTime new 2012  1  15  strftime   s      gt   1326585600

User · Answer

The suggested options of using to utc or utc to fix the local time offset does not work  For me I found using Time utc   worked correctly and the code involves less steps    gt  Time utc 2016  12  25  to i   gt  1482624000   correct   vs   gt  Date new 2016  12  25  to time utc to i   gt  1482584400   incorrect     Here is what happens when you call utc after using Date       gt  Date new 2016  12  25  to time   gt  2016-12-25 00 00 00  1100   This will use your system s time offset  gt  Date new 2016  12  25  to time utc   gt  2016-12-24 13 00 00 UTC      so clearly calling to i is going to give the wrong timestamp

User · Answer

The code date to time to i should work fine   The Rails console session below shows an example    gt  gt  Date new 2009 11 26  to time   gt  Thu Nov 26 00 00 00 -0800 2009  gt  gt  Date new 2009 11 26  to time to i   gt  1259222400  gt  gt  Time at 1259222400    gt  Thu Nov 26 00 00 00 -0800 2009   Note that the intermediate DateTime object is in local time  so the timestamp might be a several hours off from what you expect   If you want to work in UTC time  you can use the DateTime s method  to utc

User · Answer

DateTime new 2012  1  15  to time to i

User · Answer

I get the following when I try it    gt  gt  Date today to time to i   gt  1259244000  gt  gt  Time now to i   gt  1259275709   The difference between these two numbers is due to the fact that Date does not store the hours  minutes or seconds of the current time  Converting a Date to a Time will result in that day  midnight

[ruby-on-rails] Ruby/Rails: converting a Date to a UNIX timestamp

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