Ruby rss stdlib conflict with Time#to_s(:format)

Huh, that's weird -- you're getting a 1 for 0 args error on #to_s, which makes me think a nil got in there, or some other class that doesn't accept a :format param for #to_s. But I can't figure out how that would have happened.

What was your work-around?

      # item.pubDate reports to be of type Time. Time.parse(item.pubDate.to_s) works fine.
      # Using item.pubDate directly (as shown) this results in the exception seen in trace.txt
      # when saving.
      # When replacing 'item.pubDate' with 'Time.parse(item.pubDate.to_s)' things work fine (as expected)
 
      :published_at => item.pubDate,

item.pubDate comes from parsing an RSS feed with SimpleRSS.parse. It reports to of type Time. The work-around is to convert the pubDate to string and parse it again.

Also see http://gist.github.com/43755 for the full code.

Ok I did a quick test, it appears that a pubDate returned from the Ruby stdlib RSS parser is a class of Time, but the arity of its to_s method is 0, even if you load ActiveSupport, which alias_method_chains behavior on #to_s to allow you to pass in a format param. Hence, the "ArgumentError: wrong number of arguments (1 for 0)"

Other time objects respond as expected -- Time.now.to_s(:db) will work fine. So, the RSS library isn't overriding ActiveSupport globally, it appears to be limited the case of datetimes it parses from XML.

I took a look at the Ruby RSS parsing code, but I can't easily figure out what's going on there. Dunno if there's anything we can really do about this.