Ruby Time.strftime pads %e with whitespace

I just ran into this quick issue so I thought i'd share it.

When trying to create a Date format for Rails i18n.l you are at the mercy of Time.strftime and my format was supposed to look like this: "%e. %b %Y" - so the quite common 1. Jul 2015. According to the excellent http://www.foragoodstrftime.com/ %e should give me the non-zero-padded day of the month - but my tests still failed because of a leading whitespace on days < 10.

Looking at the reference I noticed that strftime allows flags for each replacement to modify how padding and other things work. The solution to getting rid of the whitespace was to change the format to this: %-e. %b %Y.

Here is the list of flags from the documentation:

-  don't pad a numerical output
_  use spaces for padding
0  use zeros for padding
^  upcase the result string
#  change case
:  use colons for %z

The flags just go after the % and before the format directive. Hope this helps.