Brian Candler wrote: > So you can see that "Oct" is taken as the timezone, and there is no > month. I expect it's subsequently defaulting the month to the current > month (Nov), and that's why you're not allowed the 31st. > Thanks, Brian. Looks like the best explanation. This also means that the fact that it worked fine for the rest of October was totally by the lucky coincidence that my code worked in real-time - i.e. processing data for the current month. So the month was automatically set to the current (October in this case). Anyway, I moved to the manual parsing with strftime, which leaves the code no place to guess. Thanks all for taking care. -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.