# Marshalling a Time loses zone info **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [July 4, 2007, 4:38am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/marshalling-a-time-loses-zone-info/108496 "2007-07-04T04:38:04Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![brettschuchert](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/b/278dde/32.png) [@brettschuchert](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/brettschuchert)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2007, 4:38am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/marshalling-a-time-loses-zone-info/108496/1 "2007-07-04T04:38:04Z")
I was dealing with a weird problem today that I eventually traced back to the fact that marshalling and unmarshalling a Time object will implicitly convert it to local time: t = Time.new t.utc s = Marshal.dump t new\_t = Marshal.load s t.to\_s # “Wed Jul 04 02:09:05 UTC 2007” new\_t.to\_s # “Tue Jul 03 19:09:05 -0700 2007” I know that they still represent the same time, but it seems to me like the zone is an important part of the state of the object. Is this intentional or a bug? This was a problem because my app is getting objects from a database that’s running in UTC. It gets some Time objects from the db adapter and sends them, along with some other data, over the network using DRb (which uses Marshal.dump/load). These are then used in another query back to the same database, but the adapter (OCI8) ignores the time zone. As a result, the times it was using in the queries would be 7 hours behind what they should be. I solved it by calling .utc on any Time objects that come in over the network to make sure everything is UTC, but it was an interesting problem. I’m using 1.8.6, I haven’t tried it with 1.9 yet. -Brett