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I stumbled upon an interesting (and for quit some time puzzling) behavior using the Chronic gem.

Parsing the string 1/21/13 2:20:

Chronic.parse('1/21/13 2:20')
=> 2013-01-21 14:20:00 -0800

However, if a 0 is place in front of the 2:

Chronic.parse('1/21/13 02:20')
 => 2013-01-21 02:20:00 -0800

Now, I can put AM or PM at the end of the string, which essentially overrides this behavior (so it doesn't matter whether the leading 0 is present), but that is obviously an extra step of parsing, and negates much of the advantage of using Chronic. Is there another option to deal with this leading zero problem appropriately? It caught me off guard that this wasn't already figured out.

I should note that the strings I need to parse could be either of the two presented cases above.

Evan Zamir
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  • How does adding AM/PM negatve the advantage of using Chronic? I think the most reasonable course of action is a pull request on the gem to make the behaviour consistent. – sunnyrjuneja Jan 31 '13 at 21:48
  • @SunnyJuneja It doesn't completely negate using Chronic, but it's an extra step of parsing on my end (the strings are coming from an external source that I have no control over). The whole idea of Chronic, however, seems to be to avoid kludgy parsing like that. – Evan Zamir Jan 31 '13 at 22:01

1 Answers1

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Well, you could just subtract 12 hours:

time = Chronic.parse('1/21/13 2:20')
time -= - 12 * 60 * 60 if time.hour >= 12
#=> 2013-01-22 02:20:00 0800
pguardiario
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