Make Time "Stand Still" in Ruby

bshow (Bob Showalter) — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 21:36:47 GMT

When writing tests, it's sometimes difficult to test results of methods that use current time. Two calls to Time.now can give different results and cause test failures. Here is some code that lets you execute a block during which Time.now will return a consistent value:



class Time



  # this code adds a Time.freeze method to make time "stand still"

  # during execution of a block. This can be helpful during testing of

  # methods that depend on Time.new or Time.now

  #

  # Example:

  #

  #   Time.freeze do

  #      puts Time.new.to_f

  #      # ... do stuff; real time passes

  #      puts Time.new.to_f     # outputs same time as above

  #   end

  #   # ... time returns to normal

  #

  # An optional Time object may be passed to freeze to a specific time:

  #

  #   Time.freeze(Time.at(2007, 11, 15)) do

  #      # ...

  #   end

  #

  # While inside the block, Time.frozen? will return true



  class << self



    def now

      @time || orig_new

    end



    alias_method :orig_freeze, :freeze

    alias_method :orig_new, :new

    alias_method :new, :now



    # makes time "stand still" during execution of a block. if no time is

    # supplied, the current time is used. While in the block, Time.new and

    # Time.now will always return the "frozen" value.

    def freeze(time = nil)

      raise "A block is required" unless block_given?

      begin

        prev = @time

        @time = time || now

        yield

      ensure

        @time = prev

      end

    end



    def frozen?

      !@time.nil?

    end



  end

end

Identify duplicates in an array

bshow (Bob Showalter) — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 00:21:22 GMT

Method to return items that appear more than once in an array (or Enumerable)



module Enumerable

  def dups

    inject({}) {|h,v| h[v]=h[v].to_i+1; h}.reject{|k,v| v==1}.keys

  end

end

How it works: the inject method builds up a hash with keys for the unique values in the array and
a value representing the number of times the entry is found in the array. Any entries with a
value of 1 (i.e. not duplicated) are removed, and the resulting keys represents the duplicated
entries in the original array.

Example:



arr = %w{foo bar baz bar baz qux foo zub}

puts arr.dups.inspect

# => ["baz", "foo", "bar"]

DZone Snippets: Bshow's Code Snippets

Make Time "Stand Still" in Ruby

Identify duplicates in an array