Jamal,
Your code does explain what's going on. Time.parse is not returning
what you would expect because you are passing in just the String
representation of a month (rather than of a complete date). An easy
way to make it do what you want is to tack on a day to the end of the
string.
For instance (in IRB):
>> Time.parse("03")
=> Sat Jun 02 12:46:40 CDT 2007
>> Time.parse("04")
=> Sat Jun 02 12:46:44 CDT 2007
>> Time.parse("03/01")
=> Thu Mar 01 00:00:00 CST 2007
>> Time.parse("04/01")
=> Sun Apr 01 00:00:00 CDT 2007
>> Time.parse("04/01").strftime("%b")
=> "Apr"
I hope this helps,
David
Well, the problem is that when you only pass Time.parse a single number, it does not know how to interpret that. Is it a month? A year? A day? There's no real way to tell. The way Time.parse works is it tries to match the string you pass in against a series of patterns. Most of the time, it does what you want. (i.e., if a person could tell how to interpret the string as a date, Time.parse probably will be able to as well). The exact details of how it does the matching, however, are complex. The best place to look is probably the source code -- see the _parse method in date/format.rb in the standard libs if you want to see exactly what it's doing -- there's a lot of code there, but it's pretty readable, as long as you grok regular expressions.
Thanks,
David L Altenburg
http://gensym.org
