Comparing times only, without dates?

Question

I need to write a method that will check if Time.now is in between the open hours and the close hours of a shop.

The open and close hours are saved as a Tim

Answer 1

Instead of trying to compare the point of time directly, you can compare their offsets from a common reference (e.g. midnight). You might need to make sure all times are using the same time zone, depending on your use case.

In Rails, this can be done easily with one of the helpers such as #seconds_since_midnight:

#given
opening_hour = DateTime.new(2012,2,2,2,30,0)

#compare
now = DateTime.now.in_time_zone('UTC')
opening_hour_since_midnight = opening_hour.seconds_since_midnight
now_since_midnight = now.seconds_since_midnight
p 'shop opened' if now_since_midnight > opening_hour_since_midnight