I'm parsing something like this:
11/23/10 23:29:57
which has no time zone associated with it, but I know it's in the UTC time zone (while I'm not). How can I get Ruby to parse this as if it were in the UTC timezone?
You could just append the UTC timezone name to the string before parsing it:
require 'time'
s = "11/23/10 23:29:57"
Time.parse(s) # => Tue Nov 23 23:29:57 -0800 2010
s += " UTC"
Time.parse(s) # => Tue Nov 23 23:29:57 UTC 2010