CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railschronic
Benjamin
Benjamin

Reputation: 3950

Chronic stopped parsing a simple time format on a daylight savings day

I have been using Chronic successfully in my Rails app for a few weeks. I haven't been doing anything fancy with it, just using it to parse basic time inputs like '1:21pm' or '1440' etc. Everything was working fine up until today when I ran my test suite and came across a very odd failure.

These all work:

Chronic.parse('1:21am')
=> 2016-10-02 00:21:00 +1000
Chronic.parse('0121')
=> 2016-10-03 01:21:00 +1100
Chronic.parse('0021')
=> 2016-10-03 00:21:00 +1100
Chronic.parse('1:21 AM')
=> 2016-10-02 00:21:00 +1000

However 12:21 AM returns nil:

Chronic.parse('12:21 AM')
=> nil

In my code I'm actually doing a strftime to strip out the date and just keep the time because that's all I care about. But naturally that doesn't work when Chronic returns nil.

self.time = Chronic.parse(time).try(:strftime, '%l:%M %p')

What's interesting is that this morning daylight savings kicked in for my timezone, Sydney. I haven't changed anything else around this code for a while, so my guess is that it's related.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 76

Answers (1)

Benjamin
Benjamin

Reputation: 3950

There are two solutions:

A) Tell Chronic to use Time.zone

This way worked for me. Basically:

Chronic.time_class = Time.zone
self.time = Chronic.parse(time).try(:strftime, '%l:%M %p')

B) Parse using a fixed date that is not affected by daylight savings

Since I am only interested in the time and not the date, in this case we could use a specific date that we know is not affected by daylight savings when parsing the time. For example:

Chronic.parse("5/27/1979 at #{time}").try(:strftime, '%l:%M %p')

Upvotes: 0

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