Exact Difference between two dates in days and hours

Question

I want to get exact time in days and hours between two dates something like between Thu Jul 18 11:30:00 +0000 2013 and Sat Jul 20 10:30:00 +0000 2013 . There is difference of 1 day and 23 hours . The Rails' ActionView module includes two methods

(1) distance_of_time_in_words
(2) distance_of_time_in_words_to_now

but they return result like 1 day or 2 day i need hours also.

Answer 1

If you don't want to use any gem then you can simply do following calculations to get exact difference of minutes and seconds too -

t1 = Time.now #date1
t2 = (Time.now - 10.hours) #date2

seconds = (t1.to_i - t2.to_i)
days = seconds / 86400;
hours = seconds / 3600;
minutes = (seconds - (hours * 3600)) / 60;
seconds = (seconds - (hours * 3600) - (minutes * 60));

Answer 2

The plugin dotiw might be useful to solve this issue.

dotiw is a plugin for Rails that overrides the default distance_of_time_in_words and provides a more accurate output.

Answer 3

There's a gem for that: time_diff !

https://rubygems.org/gems/time_diff

It will display the time difference and you can even format the output. Example:

'%y, %M, %w, %d and %h:%m:%s' will return: '1 year, 2 months, 3 weeks, 4 days and 12:05:52'

The syntax is also very straighforward:

> Time.diff(Time.parse('2010-03-06 12:30:00'), Time.parse('2011-03-07 12:30:30'), '%y, %d and %h:%m:%s')
=> {:year => 1, :month => 0, :week => 0, :day => 0, :hour => 18, :minute => 0, :second => 30, :diff => '1 year and 18:00:30'}

You should be able to get what you need out of this.

Happy coding !

Answer 4

date_1 = DateTime.parse("Thu Jul 18 11:30:00 +0000 2013")
date_2 = DateTime.parse("Sat Jul 20 10:30:00 +0000 2013")

difference_in_hours =  (date_2.to_time - date_1.to_time) / 60 / 60