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

%Z is the correct way to specify a Time zone name. Have you tried the following ?

date_and_time = '%m-%d-%Y %H:%M:%S %Z'
DateTime.strptime("04-15-2010 10:00:00 Central Time (US & Canada)",date_and_time)