From: "Jesús Gabriel y Galán" <jgabrielygalan@...>
Date: 2011-01-27T01:02:18+09:00
Subject: Re: Issues with Time.parse

On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 4:56 PM, Jens Finnäs <jens.finnas@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I just started working my way around web scraping with Ruby and I  just
> run in to some problems with Time.parse.
>
> I'm scraping a date from a website:
>
> collect_last_bid =
> last_bid_cell.scan(/\d{1,2}\.\d{1,2}\.\d{1,4}\b.\b\d{1,2}\:\d{1,2}:\d{1,2}/)
>
> ...which comes out nicely as "26.01.2011 21:00:08"
>
> However, when I Time.parse the variable:
>
> right_now = Time.parse(collect_last_bid)
>
> ...I get "Error in time.rb, Line 240 in 'parse'"
>
> Parsing the string with Time.parse("26.01.2011 21:00:08") works fine.
>
> Any thoughts?

String#scan returns an array:

irb(main):001:0> s = "<td>26.01.2011 21:00:08</td>"
=> "<td>26.01.2011 21:00:08</td>"
irb(main):003:0> time =
s.scan(/\d{1,2}\.\d{1,2}\.\d{1,4}\b.\b\d{1,2}\:\d{1,2}:\d{1,2}/)
=> ["26.01.2011 21:00:08"]
irb(main):005:0> require 'time'
=> true
irb(main):006:0> Time.parse(time)
NoMethodError: private method `gsub!' called for ["26.01.2011 21:00:08"]:Array
	from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/date/format.rb:1061:in `_parse'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/time.rb:240:in `parse'
	from (irb):6
	from :0
irb(main):007:0> Time.parse(time[0])
=> Wed Jan 26 21:00:08 +0100 2011

Jesus.