Ruby/Rails: converting a Date to a UNIX timestamp

Question

How would I get a UNIX timestamp (number of seconds since 1970 GMT) from a Date object in a Rails app?

I know Time#to_i returns a timestamp, but doing <

Answer 1

I get the following when I try it:

>> Date.today.to_time.to_i
=> 1259244000
>> Time.now.to_i
=> 1259275709

The difference between these two numbers is due to the fact that Date does not store the hours, minutes or seconds of the current time. Converting a Date to a Time will result in that day, midnight.