converting Date object to TimeWithZone

Question

I need to convert a Date object into a TimeWithZone object representing the beginning of that day in a given time zone.

The following approach works, but seems too c

Answer 1

I'm late to the party, but this is still a great question. ActiveSupport's in_time_zone was introduced since the O.P., but it does exactly what you want without parsing a string (slow) or setting Time.zone (risky):

>> date = Date.parse("2010-02-17")
=> Wed, 17 Feb 2010
>> date.in_time_zone('Eastern Time (US & Canada)')
=> Wed, 17 Feb 2010 00:00:00 EST -05:00

Of course if you want the beginning of day expressed at utc, you can do this:

>> date.in_time_zone('Eastern Time (US & Canada)').utc
=> 2010-02-17 05:00:00 UTC