Q:

Calculate difference in days ActiveSupport:TimeWithZone in the most "rubyish" style?

I have a feeling someone is going to point me to another question that answers this but I've been searching with no luck over this simple issue.
I have a Activerecord with a datetime property. It returns as an ActiveSupport:TimeWithZone. I know I can't compare that to DateTime.now because that doesn't include a zone so I need to use Time.zone. Makes sense.
What I'm wondering is stylewise is there a "cleaner" way to do this than subtracting and dividing the result by 86400? 
Here's what I do:
((Time.zone.now - myActiveRecord.visit_date)/86400).to_i

Works but seems un-rubyish and I feel like I'm missing something. Should I be casting, comparing or converting some other route or is this really the typical way to do this in rails? Appreciate any tips or a link to a question that already covers this.
Thank you

A:

One thing you can do to make it more readable is: 
((Time.zone.now - myActiveRecord.visit_date) / 1.day).to_i

Edit:
Actually you can get rid of one set of the brackets with:
(Time.zone.now - myActiveRecord.visit_date).to_i / 1.day

A:

I know this question is a bit dated but I came across it while Googling for a similar problem. In my case I needed to know the difference in whole days on a macro and micro scale.
For example, I needed my code to be able to tell me that Dec 31, 2010 is 366 days before Jan 1, 2012 and that Dec 31, 2010 23:59 is 1 day away from Jan 1, 2011 00:00. The method above works in the former but in the case of the latter, it says they are 0 days apart.
What I ended up doing was using Ruby's Date class to do the math for me. Using the code above my method looks like this:
(Time.zone.now.to_date - myActiveRecord.visit_date.to_date).to_i
This will work with inputs in Time or DateTime due to the conversion. Another possible solution would be to first call beginning_of_day on each of the Times or DateTimes but in my case, the minutes were important.

A:

Rails actually has a method built in for just this sort of thing.
checkout #time_ago_in_words
So, for the original case...
((Time.zone.now - myActiveRecord.visit_date)/86400).to_i
vs
time_ago_in_words(myActiveRecord.visit_date)

