--- title: Working with YAML and converting string time to integer slug: working-with-yaml-and-converting-string-time-to-integer published_at: 2021-07-26 13:30:11 +0000 updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:14:03 +0000 summary: description: In this episode, we'll work a bit with a YAML file and convert a timestamp from a string to an integer number of seconds. We'll also play with some Ruby enumerable methods tags: [Working with YAML and Ruby, Ruby YAML, Convert string time to integer seconds] views: 1551 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/working-with-yaml-and-converting-string-time-to-integer youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdYSwFewTsg youtube_id: XdYSwFewTsg embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/XdYSwFewTsg thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/XdYSwFewTsg/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Working with YAML and converting string time to integer *Published: July 26, 2021* *Views: 1551* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdYSwFewTsg) [![Working with YAML and converting string time to integer](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/XdYSwFewTsg/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdYSwFewTsg) ## Description In this episode, we'll work a bit with a YAML file and convert a timestamp from a string to an integer number of seconds. We'll also play with some Ruby enumerable methods ## Transcript cheers welcome back in this episode we're going to talk about reading some yaml data we're going to do like a tiny little conversion of a time from a string time with uh you know hours minute seconds and then we're going to write back as just a second's integer so it'll be just sort of a little bit of a reading files and writing files with yaml and then a bit of time conversion so what i wanted to do here i have this videos.yaml file that has a yaml structure that lists out a bunch of video objects where we have an id then we have some preferences we have a youtube id and a title description and we have this duration and right now this duration is stored as a minutes colon seconds and it might even be like hours minutes seconds and what i want to do is convert this duration into just an integer value for the second so for uh um 8 minutes 50 seconds this should be like duration is equal to like 8 times 60 plus 50 or something like that right so what is this this is like 8 times 60 so 480 uh plus 50. so that the answer here should just be like 530 because we just want the total seconds as an integer value so we're going to do today is read in this file with ruby change the durations into integer values in seconds and then write it back out with ruby also so the first thing i want to do here is open up a new thing called like video durations dot rb this will be just like a simple file all right so what we're going to do is first we're going to start by requiring yaml acquire email and then we're going to call yaml.loadfile and we're going to pass it that that local file videos.yaml and this should just give us the the videos as as yaml so let's run this ruby video durations and we'll see what that gives okay so this is gonna be like a ruby uh a ruby object where we now can use it as if it were a hash um and so we need to like go through each of these videos and then we're going to write it back as yaml so this is going to be our videos and so what we want to do now is we want to like loop over the videos or this is kind of like this like raw data because the key videos like at the top level we have a videos key so it's going to be like data videos dot each do video and then we can print out the video and we'll run that again okay so this is this is each of the individual videos and then i think the duration yeah so the duration should be a key that's at the video level so i think we might be able to even say duration here and that should give us just the two durations perfect okay so now we're seeing the two durations spit out and now what we want to do is maybe like let's say like convert or like duration duration two seconds or something like that um we can write a little method down here duration to seconds it's going to take like in uh the string the string duration and then it wants we want this to return an integer value um okay so then the other thing that i would probably want to do here is uh yeah so let's this should be fairly straightforward we need we want to split on colon so this is going to be our components where we're going to have like um like maybe we call this like the parts and we're going to say duration dot split on colon and that should take the string value that has like colons in it so this should take like if we get like 0 8 50 and when we split we're going to get the string 0 8 and then the string 50 as two separate components um and those are going to be our parts so then we can probably like map those to i so we can say dot map and pass it a block here that's like uh part and we can say part.2i right because this is the the return value or the implicit return value from the block is what will be returned and so like after we do that then we should get back just the integer values for 8 and 50. okay but this is so this pattern with using map is so common where you can pass a block and then you're calling a method on an element that is passed to the block this is so common that there's actually a shortcut here where we can instead of passing the block at all instead we can execute map and pass in 2i just like this with the ampersand in front and this will operate as if we're calling or as if we're passing sort of a block where two i's going to be pulled off of the element and executed just the same way that we had with the block method let's also just print out parts down here and then i think in order to run this we need it to be um before we actually call it we have to define the function so let's run this and take a look okay so now we get back 8 and 50. so that's cool and we're also getting 28 and 39. so now the trick becomes um what we need to do is uh um we need to multiply the first component by 60 to give us 60 seconds right because the first component is going to be in minutes and then we need to add it to the second component but in order to do this so that it works with both minutes and hours like so if we had zero one like if it was one hour eight minutes and fifty seconds then it's gonna be a little trickier or in the case where we started off with even i guess in the case where we start off with zero if it was like just 50 seconds long that would still work because we're splitting on colon and the first element would be zero so i think we're going to need two cases where we have either two components or three components so i think what we want to do is like this simple way that we could do this is say if parts dot count is equal to two then we could return uh yeah we could return parts.first times 60 plus parts.last okay l else if parts.count is equal to three um then we want to do part stuff first times sixty times 60 or yeah we'll just keep it simple and clear to start with and then so that's going to be our hour plus and then our minute is going to be parts at 1 times 60 and then we have our parts.last so that should give us another option for working with the three component times timestamp um and then else we want to like raise an exception or like yeah raise uh invalid duration um maybe we even pass in the duration so that we can take a look at what it was okay so we can run this and we should be getting back we should be getting back that integer so let's print that out okay 530 and 17. all right and then the next thing we want to do is we actually want to update the video duration to be that new duration so video duration is equal to this new thing and then we can p data again and we should see like the updated videos with their new durations so now the duration is 530 that's the right in that's the right seconds and then also down here the second one duration is 1719. while we're going through this why don't we also pee out video duration before and after just so that we can like double check and make sure so 850 is turning into 5 30 28 39 is turning into 17 19. so let's do that one also so is to edit this so that we have one that's like one hour and eight minutes and fifty seconds and then if we run this again we get back uh four thousand one hundred and thirty so let's check to make sure that's right four thousand one hundred thirty that's right okay and then let's let's also clean this up a bit i think we can make this a little bit better um so that i think we can reverse the parts so that we start with minutes and then we can iterate over those and every for each uh every time that we go through we can multiply by one more um multiple of 60 i think so then we can probably do something like this so we have we're going to split on colon then we're going to reverse and then we want to like map with index um do uh part and i and then in here we'll put our put our logic that we want to to print out so we want to print out like i times 60 or okay so in this case 60 times 60 is not 2 times 60 right this is 60 squared so it's actually like 60 to the i right i think this will work so like component or like let's print let's just print that out for now and see what we get uh as we're iterating okay wait why is this uh undefined method map with index i thought this was a an okay is this not a enumerable map with index i thought we could map with index is it dot map dot with index or something um each with index.map huh oh here we go map okay so it's map dot with index okay so let's see if this works all right so we see 60 6162 so this this is not actually raising it to the exponents uh is it is it star star there we go okay so the first one we're gonna get one the second one we get 60 the last one we get 360. so that's going to be the the number of times that we want to multiply our component by right so now we're going to get part times that and we should get back the right number i believe and i think this is actually what we want to oh no and then we want to like sum those up so if we pee parts now we should see like each of the different pieces here so we're getting one hour plus uh eight minutes which i think is that's right right so eight times 60 yep it's 480 and then 50 seconds and we want to add all of these up and that should give us our answer so now we can say like um let's see dot inject and with inject we can pass it an accumulator right so that's like ours our in our um like a seed value or initial value and we can say do accumulator and the uh the part and now we're going to say like acc plus part so this is another case here that is super common right that when you're working with uh with arrays and inject where you're going to pass some seed value and then you want to do some operation uh with on the accumulator and the part or on the accumulator and the element and so this one also has a shortcut where i believe we can put past like symbol and plus and that will sum up the results so now if we run it we get back our correct numbers here but there might even just be like dot sum so let's see if that is a thing okay so there is dot sum that's like a quicker and easier version and then that's actually what we want to return is that result there so that is just a little bit cleaner so we're taking the duration we're splitting on the colon okay and then we're mapping that into integers so that's going to give us these integer values then we're reversing it so that the minute comes first or so that the second comes first then the minute then the hour and the reason that we're doing that is so that when we map over that list with index then we're going to get the part so the very first one is going to be the second and i is going to be equal to zero and when we say 60 raised to the zero that that's going to return one because anything raised to the zero element you get back one and so then we're going to say one times the part so 1 times the number of seconds in this case 1 times 50 is 50. so that's going to be the result there then when we go look at the second component so i guess like maybe it makes sense to yeah let's let's break this down here like this so that's like starting point and then after split we get this and then after map we get this and then after reverse we get this 50 comma 8 and then after map with index times i now we're going to get 50 and then we're going to get 8 times 60 and then uh sum we're gonna get whatever this is 480 plus was it 480 plus 50 it's 5 30. so that's kind of like the whole the steps as we go through the process given that input um so hopefully this makes sense but the reason that we wanted to do this this magic here is that now we can support like several different uh com like versions of the the time string that's separated by colons so this should this should work i think um the one thing that was a little bit nicer about the previous iteration is that if we had some time component where it was like something like zero one zero two zero three zero four right like this doesn't really make sense unless we're talking about milliseconds or something um so it'd be like one hour two minutes three seconds and four milliseconds we don't really want to support that furthermore we don't want to support something like this right uh like maybe someone passes a mac address or something crazy um right now our duration two seconds will totally just figure out what the sum is given this input but we don't really want to to handle that that amount of input so instead of like messing around with this one thing we could do is just check to see like how many times a colon appears or something but i'm pretty confident in the input data and i don't want to fuss with it too much so this is kind of where i'm going to leave it at and i'm going to remove these comments because it is hard to read but that's kind of the idea all right so the next step here is that we actually want to write this yaml back to the yaml file or back to a new yaml file so rather than overwriting our existing yaml file i always want to work with a new one so that i don't actually like or accidentally blow away my input data so i'm going to say something like let's print out data.2 yaml and just see what this looks like and we'll remove these two so now if we run it so that let's see data.yaml okay let's do puts so that it comes out a little cleaner all right so yeah this is exactly what we want so we have videos it has an id and then we have our duration as an integer our next duration as an integer so we want to write this to a file so we can say file.open w do f f.puts and we also need to give it a file name so we're going to open dot slash videos with duration.yaml and we can always like rename it later and overwrite our existing yaml file or something like that but let's just give this a whirl and see if this works and now if we cat video with duration.yaml this is our new file now the thing that's a little weird in terms of the formatting is these are not indented anymore but i think that totally should be that should be fine um so that is how i would go about sort of taking that input file changing the duration from a string into an integer um value of seconds and then spitting it back out to yaml hopefully this is useful or interesting and uh as always appreciate your time and attention and we'll see in the next one [Music] --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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