Parse a string representation of a date into values. For example:

  require 'parsedate'

  ParseDate.parsedate "Tuesday, July 5th, 2007, 18:35:20 UTC"
  # => [2007, 7, 5, 18, 35, 20, "UTC", 2]

The order is of the form [year, month, day of month, hour, minute, second, timezone, day of week].

ParseDate.parsedate can also take a second argument, comp, which is a boolean telling the method to compensate for dates with years expressed as two digits. Example:

  require 'parsedate'

  ParseDate.parsedate "Mon Dec 25 00 06:53:24 UTC", true
  # => [2000, 12, 25, 6, 53, 24, "UTC", 1]

[Source]

# File parsedate.rb, line 46
  def parsedate(str, comp=false)
    Date._parse(str, comp).
      values_at(:year, :mon, :mday, :hour, :min, :sec, :zone, :wday)
  end