Hi, I am new to Elixir. I am trying to use the DateTime component to insert a date into MySQL however the there seems to be no way to format a datetime to a string. Can someone point me in the right direction?

You can do that iex(1)> d = DateTime.utc_now %DateTime{calendar: Calendar.ISO, day: 18, hour: 6, microsecond: {876000, 6}, minute: 8, month: 9, second: 59, std_offset: 0, time_zone: "Etc/UTC", utc_offset: 0, year: 2016, zone_abbr: "UTC"} iex(2)> DateTime.to_string(d) "2016-09-18 06:08:59.876000Z"…

Edited to clarify: Another way is - using this Calendar library : iex(1)> nbo = Calendar.DateTime.now! "Africa/Nairobi" %DateTime{calendar: Calendar.ISO, day: 23, hour: 12, microsecond: {149378, 6}, minute: 31, month: 7, second: 54, std_offset: 0, time_zone: "Africa/Nairobi", utc_offset: …

[image] kujua: nbo = Calendar.DateTime.now! “Africa/Nairobi” But that won’t work out of the box, because Calendar is behaviour http://elixir-lang.org/docs/stable/elixir/Calendar.html and without defining callbacks by you or any other model it won’t work. iex(4)> d = Calendar.DateTime.now! "A…

Correct. Calendar must have been loaded before.

Question, by loading it before I assume you mean using the hex module Calendar right?

I just realized @kujua were talking about a third party library GitHub - lau/calendar: date-time and time zone handling in Elixir · GitHub , and not about the Elixir’s standard library Calendar http://elixir-lang.org/docs/stable/elixir/Calendar.html . I think he should mention about what library he wa…

Sorry for being not clear - was a long evening yesterday :slight_smile: The mix file has a dependency {:calendar, “~> 0.16.0”} Starting in the directory where the file resides: iex -S mix. This will load all dependencies. As @sztosz rightly says this is the library https://github.com/lau/calendar …

Erlang’s calendar is also good, I use it to get string dates with flexible format like that: defmodule Util.Time do @moduledoc """ Time helper functions. """ @doc """ Get current time as string using Erlangs calendar module. """ @spec now_to_string() :: String def now_to_string() d…

@kujua I went with the Calendar module. The inbuilt one seemed pretty simple and didn’t do diffs, etc. Thanks for everyone’s help!

Elixir Programming Language Forum

DateTime Format to string?

Questions & Help Questions

benwilson512 November 29, 2018, 9:37pm 13

Can you elaborate?