From: Yukihiro Matsumoto <matz@...>
Date: 2005-01-20T11:35:44+09:00
Subject: Re: Time.strftime and UTC

Hi,

In message "Re: Time.strftime and UTC"
    on Wed, 19 Jan 2005 12:45:13 +0900, "Michael C. Libby" <mcl@andsoforth.com> writes:

|mcl@saluki:~$ ruby -e 'puts Time.new.utc.strftime("%H:%M %Z")'
|04:31 GMT
|
|If I say to convert to UTC, shouldn't I get %Z = "UTC"?
|
|It also contradicts page 649 of Pickaxe2 which says that 1.8+
|would have UTC instead of GMT anyway.

Unlike inspect or to_s, strftime honors underlying strftime(3)
function on the platform.  This means strftime(3) function on your
platform returns GMT for %Z for time on UTC zone.  I'm not sure this
situation could be fixed, since it requires either

  * abandon strftime(3) and re-implement the whole time formatting
    function.

  * or seek for the format string and replace %Z to UTC if a time is
    in the UTC zone.

which cost us much anyway.

							matz.