How do I write the hour of the time without a leading zero or leading space?
ruby, ruby-1.9, strftime, time, time-format
Solution
Time.now.strftime '%a %-l:%M %p' #=> "Thu 1:51 PM"
Write `%-l` instead of `%l`. The `-` strips leading spaces and zeroes.
You can use `-` with the other format codes, too. The Ruby strftime documentation even mentions `%-m` and `%-d`, though it fails to mention that you can use `-` with any code. Thus, `%-I` would give the same result as `%-l`. But I recommend `%-l`, because using `l` instead of `I` signifies to me that that you don’t want anything at the beginning – the space it writes looks more accidental.
You can also see an exhaustive list of Ruby 1.8 `strftime` format codes, including ones with `-` and the similar syntaxes `_` and `0`. It says that Ruby 1.8 on Mac OS X doesn’t support those extended syntaxes, but don’t worry: they work in Ruby 1.9 on my OS X machine.
Problem
In a Ruby 1.9 program, I want to format the current time like `Thu 1:51 PM`. What format code should I use for the hour of the day (`1` in this example)? ``` Time.now.strftime '%a %I:%M %p' #=> "Thu 01:51 PM" Time.now.strftime '%a %l:%M %p' #=> "Thu 1:51 PM" ``` `%I` has a leading zero (`01`). `%l` has a leading space (` 1`). I don’t see any other format code for the hour in the strftime documentation. I can’t use `.lstrip` because the space is in the middle of the string. I could use `.gsub(/ +/, " ")`, but I’m wondering if there’s a less hacky, simpler way.