How can I remove the zone from a DateTime value?

Question

I have this DateTime:

=> Fri, 03 Feb 2012 11:52:42 -0500

How can I remove the zone(-0500) in ruby? I just want something like this:

Answer 1

In addition to the accepted answer you can also add the same strftime parameters to DATE_FORMATS a Rails hash allowing you to standardise output formats in your application.

In config/initializers/datetime_formats.rb:

Time::DATE_FORMATS[:nozone] = '%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S'

Then in your code you could do:

Time.zone.now.to_s(:nozone)

You could even make it the default:

Time::DATE_FORMATS[:default] = '%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S'
Time.zone.now.to_s

There is also a separate hash for dates:

Date::DATE_FORMATS[:default] = '%a, %d %b %Y'

This feature has been around for years but appears to be little known.