I am building a sitemap for Google, and want to use Ruby to format the datetime in their recommended format using the W3C standard with the time zone, like this,
YYYY-MM-DDThh:mmTZD
where TZD is the Time Zone Designator. However the default format being exported from the last_updated field from an SQL database by Ruby on Rails has spaces in it, eg
2014-09-19 10:33:05 UTC
How do I format the datetime in ruby to remove spaces and include the time zone in the correct format?
TZD can be accessed in ruby using the strftime method, like this:
myobject.updated_at.strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z")
This will format time with TZD in the following format
2014-09-26T07:53:14+0000
However I need to get the TZD in format +00:00
According to the Ruby docs I should be able to use
%:z
However this shows up as
2014-09-26T08:10:21%:z
ruby 1.8.7
Yes, but the docs you are linking are for latest stable version (1.9.3), not 1.8.7 - which BTW - is no longer supported. And it seems that %:z option was not available in Ruby 1.8.7.
There are also stable versions: 2.0.0, and 2.1.3 - in any of them you will get required behaviour.