Introduction

This library extends the Time class:

• conversion between date string and time object.

  • date-time defined by RFC 2822

  • HTTP-date defined by RFC 2616

  • dateTime defined by XML Schema Part 2: Datatypes (ISO 8601)

  • various formats handled by Date._parse (string to time only)

Design Issues

Specialized interface

This library provides methods dedicated to special purposes:

• RFC 2822, RFC 2616 and XML Schema.

• They makes usual life easier.

Doesn’t depend on strftime

This library doesn’t use strftime. Especially #rfc2822 doesn’t depend on strftime because:

• %a and %b are locale sensitive

  Since they are locale sensitive, they may be replaced to invalid weekday/month name in some locales. Since ruby-1.6 doesn’t invoke setlocale by default, the problem doesn’t arise until some external library invokes setlocale. Ruby/GTK is the example of such library.

• %z is not portable

  %z is required to generate zone in date-time of RFC 2822 but it is not portable.