# time.rb

Path: | time.rb
Last Update: | Sat Oct 15 23:44:28 AUS Eastern Standard Time 2005

## 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.

## Revision Information

$Id$

### Required files

parsedate test/unit

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