From: Martin Pirker <crf@...>
Date: 2003-01-12T09:27:18+09:00
Subject: time & timezones

Hi...

It's time again to call upon the higher powers for enlightenment, bear
with me for I'm still a novice ;)

In internet data (mail/news/logs/...) one handles many time/date
stamps from different timezones.
ParseDate does an amazing job of parsing, but I don't know what
to do with the result.
In order to compare points in time one has to convert all the stamps
to one time zone, e.g. convert them all to GMT/UTC,
but... how do I do this in Ruby?

Class Time doesn't provide a function to create a new one with
the values from ParseDate (timezone!) - at least I wasn't successful
with the 10 parameter form of .gm ?!?

Bonus question: Is there a function which outputs a Time object
in RFC form (date -R on Linux prompt), as strftime with %Z gives a name,
not easier (re)parseable numbers for timezone?

Thanks!
Martin