Jigyasa Makkar

I worked my way around an interesting information tidbit discovery yesterday. The use case seemed pretty simple and direct. I needed to display the “n hours ago” text in my view. I used the awesome view helper ‘time_ago_in_words’ to do that and it worked, well almost.

Here’s what I’m talking about:
In console,

time_string = "2010-07-21 11:52:31"
helper.time_ago_in_words(time_string) # => about 5 hours


The catch here is that the “5 hours” duration is incorrect. This was hardly 5 minutes ago! So, the problem here was in time zones.
By default,

time_string.to_time # => Wed Jul 21 11:52:31 UTC 2010

Notice the time zone offset. It has been set to “UTC” by default. But the original time zone of this string time was different. And the tricky part is, it was different for different environments. So how’d we get past this? Here’s the entire snippet:

def custom_time_ago_in_words(time_str)
time = time_str.to_time + (-Time.zone_offset(Time.now.zone))
"#{time_ago_in_words(time)} ago"
end

This essentially adjusts the time according to the server time zone and gives correct output as “5 minutes ago”.