Fixing edge case and adding documentation to String to Date/Time/DateTime conversion methods

[jasondew]

Specifically, making it where, say, "foo".to_date doesn't cause an exception.

[drogus]

I'm not sure if that's how it should look like, considering that "1".to_time will raise an exception, why should passing other invalid values silently return nil? I know that it returns nil for blank string, but this seems to be kind of different case, cause there is no info there.

[jasondew]

What I would like is for all of these functions to return nil if it can't parse a date. I think that's a better solution than throwing an exception. I'll work on fixing the integer string case if we agree on the overall goal.

[drogus]

I doubt it will be accepted. It's debatable (I mean, there is no right way to do it) and it will break backwards compatibility.

[drogus]

I'm closing this as there is no clear win of returning nil over raising exceptions that would justify breaking backwards compatibility.

@jasondew thanks for the patch anyway

[jasondew]

no worries, it was worth a try :)