icalendar devel - Jan 2008 - Status of Timezone support / Handeling DTSTART; TZID="(GMT-05.00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)":20080107T123000

I can not tell from the docs or from the mailing list what is the  
state of timezone support in the iCalendar package?

If I want to parse an iCalendar file that has non utc dstarts and  
dends will it convert those times to UTC or otherwise allow me to do  
that?

When I tried to parse an iCalendar input file started off with  
something like this:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
METHOD:REQUEST
PRODID:Microsoft CDO for Microsoft Exchange
VERSION:2.0
BEGIN:VTIMEZONE
TZID:(GMT-05.00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
X-MICROSOFT-CDO-TZID:10
BEGIN:STANDARD
DTSTART:16010101T020000
TZOFFSETFROM:-0400
TZOFFSETTO:-0500
RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;WKST=MO;INTERVAL=1;BYMONTH=11;BYDAY=1SU
END:STANDARD
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
DTSTART:16010101T020000
TZOFFSETFROM:-0500
TZOFFSETTO:-0400
RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;WKST=MO;INTERVAL=1;BYMONTH=3;BYDAY=2SU
END:DAYLIGHT
END:VTIMEZONE
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20080107T155404Z
DTSTART;TZID="(GMT-05.00) Eastern Time (US &
Canada)":20080107T123000


I got:
event.start.to_s
=> "2008-01-07T12:30:00+00:00"

  event.start.zone
=> "+00:00"

Even though the Dstart had a TZID setting it to Eastern Time. (Vpim  
which I''ve been using up till now, does the same thing I''m
hoping to
find a vcalendar library that can work with timezones, thus my question)

Is there any easy way to handle vcalendar files that have DSTARTs and  
DENDs that are in this format and have the event.start ether have the  
timezone or normalize them properly to utc?

Also as a side note, I was following the example in the readme (I''m  
pretty sure I did all the same requires and includes as the readme)  
and tried to do:

puts "start date-time: " + event.dtstart

But got:
TypeError: can''t convert DateTime into String
	from (irb):9:in `+''
	from (irb):9

But event.start worked fine.

??????????????????????????????
Robert J. Berger - Internet Bandwidth Development, LLC.
Voice: 408-838-8896 eFax: +1-408-490-2868
http://www.ibd.com




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