From: Matthew Keene <dfg778@...>
Date: 2005-05-15T12:00:30+09:00
Subject: Re: Possible bug in Date/ParseDate

Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:


> 
> Date._parse does not recognize long timezone including spaces, such as
> "AUS Eastern Standard Time".  It is a known limitation.  I'm not sure
> there is any standard for the timezone format.
> 
>                                                        matz.

I thought that this might be the problem, but I guess the question is
why does Time.now produce the date in this format if other standard
libraries can't handle it ?  Either Time.now should say

Sat May 14 23:28:42 AET 2005

or the standard libraries should be able to handle it.

In other words, if you say:

puts Time.now       #...1
t = Time.now.to_s
time_array = ParseDate.parsedate(t)
puts Time.local(*time_array)   #...2

then the puts at 1 and 2 should say the same thing.

What shouldn't happen (IMHO) is this...

Sun May 15 12:48:28 AUS Eastern Standard Time 2005
bug.rb:11:in `local': no implicit conversion from nil to integer
(TypeError)
       from bug.rb:11

..which is what actually happens

Just to prove it (mainly to myself - I've only been using Ruby for a
week or two, and I think that you might understand it a little better
than I do :)), I tried the following:

time_array = ParseDate.parsedate("Sun May 15 12:48:28 AET 2005")
puts Time.local(*time_array)   

which prints 

Sun May 15 12:48:28 AUS Eastern Standard Time 2005


So it's this inconsistency that I think is the bug, not the inability of
ParseDate to handle timezones with spaces.