converting Date object to TimeWithZone

Question

I need to convert a Date object into a TimeWithZone object representing the beginning of that day in a given time zone.

The following approach works, but seems too c

Answer 1

If you have Time.zone set in Rails then you can call Date#at_beginning_of_day (see http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/Date.html#method-i-at_beginning_of_day). Contrast this with Date#to_datetime:

Time.zone
 => #, @utc_offset=nil, @current_period=nil, @name="UTC"> 

date = Date.today
 => Thu, 31 May 2012 

date.to_datetime
 => Thu, 31 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 

date.at_beginning_of_day
 => Thu, 31 May 2012 00:00:00 UTC +00:00 

Time.zone = 'America/Chicago'
 => "America/Chicago" 

date.to_datetime
 => Thu, 31 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 

date.at_beginning_of_day
 => Thu, 31 May 2012 00:00:00 CDT -05:00