Question

I would expect Time and to_time to be reflective.

UPDATE

This is the answer, if you add the parameter :local, it doesn’t ignore the offset. I find it wierd that it ignores data (the offset) by default, though…

Time.zone.now.to_s.to_time(:local) returns 2012-03-20 14:39:03 +0100

/UPDATE

> Time.zone.now.to_s
 => "2012-03-20 12:50:05 +0100" 
> Time.zone.now.to_s.to_time.to_s
 => "2012-03-20 12:50:05 UTC" 
# PROBLEM:
# UTC is +0000, meaning that there is 1 hour diff in the above
> Time.zone.now
 => Tue, 20 Mar 2012 12:51:32 CET +01:00 
> Time.zone.now.to_time
 => Tue, 20 Mar 2012 12:51:32 CET +01:00 
> Time.zone.now.to_json
 => "\"2012-03-20T12:50:36+01:00\"" 
> Time.zone.now.to_json.to_time
 => 2012-03-20 12:50:36 UTC 

I have this problem with JSON messages. Anyway, I wouldn’t expect to_time to actually change the time. OK to translate to UTC, probably, but it should adjust time accordingly. Anybody know if this is a known issue or “by design”?

Answer 1

This method, String#to_time, defined in ActiveSupport takes one parameter, form, which can be either :utc (default) or :local. So by default, it always returns a Time in UTC.

To get a Time with timezone:

Time.zone.parse("2012-03-20T12:50:36+01:00")