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@phoet
phoet / char_converter.rb
Last active September 27, 2015 21:48
converting characters that blow up our app
# config/initializers/char_converter.rb
require 'uri'
module Support
class CharConverter
def initialize(app)
@app = app
end

If you import live data into Google Docs spreadsheets using the importdata function and you want to force a refresh at a certain interval, but you also want to ensure that some cache-busting goes on, append a querystring that's the epoch time value that the refresh occurs, so for a sheet that should grab new data every hour you could force an update like this:

importData("http://example.com/data.csv?" & hour(googleclock()) & ")")

But the url requested looks like this: http://example.com/data.csv?11 if the refresh happened at 11am. The next day at 11, the url will be the same, so there's a chance you may get cached data. To get around this, use an epoch time-based refresh. The formula:

=((date(year(googleclock()),month(googleclock()),day(googleclock())) & " " & time(hour(googleclock()), 0, 0)) - DATE( 1970;1;1))*86400

gives you the epoch timestamp for the time at the current hour. If you wanted the timest