1. Time.parse treating unknown strings as Time.now is annoying and, imo, useless behavior — which is why I made Rails’ Time.zone.parse just return nil when it doesn’t understand input.

2. looks like Chronic fails to recognize “11/02/2008 01:20 PM” because of the leading zero on the hour — the existence of such cases is probably a good argument for layering Chronic parsing on top of TimeZone#parse via alias_method_chain, versus re-implementing it.

I just found your blog. Thanks for all the helpful timezone info.

Related to this post, I’m curious how you do you handle certain parsing issues with Chhronic. In an application that I work on, I added some logic similar to this:

t = Chronic.parse(str)
if t.nil?
t = Time.parse(str)
end

That logic isn’t great because Chronic doesn’t know how to parse strings like “11/02/2008 01:20 PM” (it returns nil), yet Time.parse defaults to Time.now when parsing strings like “asdf” (which the ruby core team says is on purpose: http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/show/281). It seems like Chronic.parse should be able to handle it all. I thought you might have run into some of this before.