On 19/07/06, Harold Hausman <hhausman / gmail.com> wrote:
> I suspect that Time.parse is just not understanding the "Malay
> Peninsula Standard Time" time zone. Or maybe theres something I'm just
> not understanding?
>
> It looks like Time.parse is missing the year at the end of the string, observe:
>
> irb(main):001:0> Time.new
> => Wed Jul 19 19:47:57 Malay Peninsula Standard Time 2006

That's odd. I get
=> Wed Jul 19 13:17:16 BST 2006
Obviously, I'm not in Malaysia, but the fact that it's an abbreviation
is significant.

> irb(main):002:0> Time.parse "Wed Jul 19 19:47:57 Malay Peninsula
> Standard Time 2006"
> => Wed Jul 19 19:47:57 Malay Peninsula Standard Time 2006

In fact, it doesn't like long time zone names at all, discarding the
bit it can't recognise and filling in the blanks:

>> Time.parse("Mon Jul 19 13:17:16 BST 2004")
=> Mon Jul 19 13:17:16 BST 2004
>> Time.parse("Mon Jul 19 13:17:16 British Summer Time 2004")
=> Wed Jul 19 13:17:16 BST 2006

Time zone names are dodgy anyway, since there are similarly-named
zones in different places (e.g. EST in Australia and North America),
but there's still something odd going on in your case.

Paul.