Question

What is the best class to represent a duration time in Ruby?

I’m writing a Run model that have distance and duration attributes.

If I want to work with minutes and seconds, the most indicated class would be time. However it has not just minutes and seconds, but also day, month, etc. What would be the proper way to store time duration in Ruby?

I’ll need to do calculations with it later, e.g., average pace = duration/distance, and the result should be in the minutes format, i.e., 5’30”, and not 5.50 min.

Answer 1

I use something like this to calculate how long a Resque job runs:

start = Time.now
#code goes here
finish = Time.now
seconds = sprintf("%0.02f", (finish - start) % 60)
minutes = (((finish - start) / 60) % 60).to_i

In this example, I’m going out to hundredths of a second, but you could tweak that if needed and possibly get rid of the sprintf all together if you wanted. That would leave you with basically seconds = (finish - start) % 60 Then a simple puts #{minutes}'#{seconds}" would get you the output you want.