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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-16T04:43:47+00:00

I have a project model with a datetime attribute to define the deadline. The

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I have a project model with a datetime attribute to define the deadline. The deadlines are of different time zones, and I receive them in a string format like below:

Jan 1st 2013 00:00:00 EST
Feb 9th 2013 23:59:00 PST

I want to store these values in the default UTC format in the database. I’ve seen that there are many options to parse the time like Time.zone.parse and Time.parse. My question is: what’s the best practice to parse the datetime of different time zones? I’m using Rails 3.2.9.

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  1. Editorial Team

    You need not worry about that at all, as long as you set correct timezone in config/application.rb:

    config.time_zone = 'UTC'

    You just assign the time strings to the attributes, ActiveRecord will convert it correctly.

    1.9.3p125 :002 > project.deadline = "Jan 1st 2013 00:00:00 EST"
 => "Jan 1st 2013 00:00:00 EST" 
1.9.3p125 :003 > project.deadline
 => Tue, 01 Jan 2013 05:00:00 UTC +00:00 
1.9.3p125 :004 > project.deadline = "Feb 9th 2013 23:59:00 PST"
 => "Feb 9th 2013 23:59:00 PST" 
1.9.3p125 :005 > project.deadline
 => Sun, 10 Feb 2013 07:59:00 UTC +00:00

    ActiveRecord uses Time.zone.parse to parse the strings internally.

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