Today I Learned

hashrocket A Hashrocket project

The case of meridian in Ruby's strftime

When formatting dates using strftime, you can include AM/PM with %p:

puts Time.now.strftime("%H:%M:%S %p")
# 20:40:52 PM

I didn't want PM capitalized, so I did this:

puts Time.now.strftime("%H:%M:%S %p").downcase
# 20:40:52 pm

But I found that you can also just use %P:

puts Time.now.strftime("%H:%M:%S %P")
# 20:40:52 pm

Yes that's right, when you want lowercase AM/PM, use uppercase P. When you want upppercase, use lower. It couldn't be more straightforward folks.

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