# DateTime.parse error on win32 (long timezone names)

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/datetime-parse-error-on-win32-long-timezone-names/97228>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [July 5, 2006, 8:47pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/datetime-parse-error-on-win32-long-timezone-names/97228 "2006-07-05T20:47:15Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![wjrogers](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/w/8797f3/32.png) [@wjrogers](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/wjrogers)\
**Post date:** [July 5, 2006, 8:47pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/datetime-parse-error-on-win32-long-timezone-names/97228/1 "2006-07-05T20:47:15Z")

</div>

NOTE: this is a cross-post from comp.lang.ruby, because I don’t think  
anyone read that message, which I posted about two months ago.

The date parsing code in the Ruby stdlib (date/format.rb) does not parse  
strings with long timezones, e.g. “Eastern Daylight Time”, as opposed to  
the abbreviated “EDT”. On win32, Time#to\_s produces a string with the  
long timezone name. So, Time.parse(Time.now.to\_s) assumes the current  
year, and DateTime.parse(Time.now.to\_s) throws an error.

This is a critical issue for me because it is causing crashes in a  
production Rails application during XML serialization in  
ActionWebService.

For example:

irb(main):012:0\> Time.now.to\_s  
=\> “Tue May 16 09:27:36 Eastern Daylight Time 2006”  
irb(main):013:0\> Time.parse Time.now.to\_s  
=\> Tue May 16 09:27:46 Eastern Daylight Time 2006  
irb(main):014:0\> Time.parse ‘Mon May 16 09:27:46 Eastern Daylight Time  
2005’  
=\> Tue May 16 09:27:46 Eastern Daylight Time 2006  
irb(main):001:0\> Date.\_parse Time.now.to\_s  
=\> {:hour=\>10, :wday=\>2, :mday=\>16, :mon=\>5, :zone=\>“Eastern”,  
:sec=\>13, :min=\>8}  
irb(main):015:0\> DateTime.parse Time.now.to\_s  
ArgumentError: 3 elements of civil date are necessary  
from c:/ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/date.rb:1214:in `new_with_hash' from c:/ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/date.rb:1258:in `parse’  
from (irb):15

(note the change of year from 2005 → 2006 in lines 5 → 6)

H:\>ruby -v  
ruby 1.8.4 (2005-12-24) [i386-mswin32]

There was a previous mention of this problem here, and Ara Howard  
indicated that it was fixed in 1.9:

[http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/161521](http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/161521)

However, since his example “works” in 1.8.4 also, because of the year  
assumption demonstrated above, I am inclined to think that it actually  
is not fixed, and Ara’s example is a false positive, so to speak.

The fact that I was unable to find any revisions in the official Ruby  
CVS addressing this problem reinforces that conclusion. If anyone knows  
for sure whether this has been fixed or not, please point me to the  
specific revision(s) in CVS.

I believe the relevant code is this regexp, beginning at  
date/format.rb:261.

```
if str.sub!(
            /(\d+):(\d+)
             (?:
               :(\d+)(?:[,.](\d*))?
             )?
             (?:
               \s*
               ([ap])(?:m\b|\.m\.)
             )?
             (?:
               \s*
               (
                 [a-z]+(?:\s+dst)?\b
               |
                 [-+]\d+(?::?\d+)
               )
             )?
            /inox,
            ' ')

```

You can see how in the last group, [a-z]+(?:\s+dst)?\b will match “EDT”  
or “Eastern” (as in the example above), but not “Eastern Standard Time”.  
But, I am hardly familiar with the inner workings of the Ruby stdlib, so  
I could be wrong. If anyone who knows more could take a look at this,  
it would be much appreciated.

- Will