From: Hugh Sasse Staff Elec Eng <hgs@...>
Date: 2001-08-08T22:35:08+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:19381] Date handling.

For reading in dates we have parsedate.  This will cope
with timezones, and such.  However, considering non-GMT zones, how does one
convert them to Time objects?  Time.local should do it, but
that requires knowing isdst, and the isdst?() method won't work unless it is
passed a correctly constructed Time value.  So how do you pass the correct
value in to local()?  Just leave it as nil, perhaps?


    def my_parsedate(date, guessyear=false)
        year, mon, mday, hour, min, sec, zone, wday = ParseDate.parsedate(date,guessyear)
        return Date.new(year, mon, mday),
            Time.local(sec, min, hour, mday, mon, year, wday, nil, nil, zone)
    end

Also, ParseDate, if passed a recent date field from ls, complains about:

Jul 27 14:56
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.6/date.rb:36:in `civil_to_jd': undefined method `/' for ni
l (NameError)
        from /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.6/date.rb:137:in `exist3?'
        from /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.6/date.rb:146:in `new3'
        from ./datestuff.rb:9:in `my_parsedate'

This is probably because the year is not defined.  Could this be changed so
that the year centred about Time.now() is used?  This would cover ls which uses
these for the last 6 months (on Solaris 2.7, anyway).

	Hugh