Rails: How to parse date-time string into a specific time zone

Question

I\'m using Rails 3.2 and ruby 1.9.3 on Debian. I have an app that collects a date, time, and timezone in the form of strings via an HTML form. Something like this:

Answer 1

This is the method that I came up with. Not the prettiest, but it works. Allows parsing the string using a specified format, and then turning it into the format that I know Time.zone.parse requires.

class ActiveSupport::TimeZone
  def strptime(time, format='%m/%d/%Y')
    formatted = Time.strptime(time, format).strftime('%Y-%m-%d %T')
    parse(formatted)
  end
end

Then you can do something like what was mentioned in another question, but with a specified format:

zone = "Central Time (US & Canada)"  
ActiveSupport::TimeZone[zone].strptime('2013-04-03', '%Y-%m-%d')

Or if you already have a time zone set:

Time.zone = "Central Time (US & Canada)" 
Time.zone.strptime('01/13/2006')

I used a default format of %m/%d/%Y because that's what my user input is most of the time. You can customize this to your needs, or use the default format DateTime uses which is believe is iso8601 (%FT%T%z)