date parsing about feed

[sof]

There's not overwhelming adherence to what the specs say on date formatting, though. Feel free to come up with reliable parsing of dates in Haskell for feeds & submit a pull request.

(I've had to spend months to get date handling reliable and right for a commercial service that's currently processing 10k feeds or so from around the globe. Not done in Haskell. People do the strangest things when it comes to dates.)

[joeyh]

sof wrote:

There's not overwhelming adherence to what the specs say on date formatting,
though. Feel free to come up with reliable parsing of dates in Haskell for
feeds & submit a pull request.

Would a Maybe Date be acceptable that works on dates that do conform to
the standards?

see shy jo

[sof]

I don't like that too much, you're left with nothing if it fails.

[joeyh]

sof wrote:

I don't like that too much, you're left with nothing if it fails.

Either String Date then?

see shy jo

[pxqr]

That would be great since an API user will want to parse it anyway. Currently I use "%a, %e %b %Y %H:%M:%S %Z" to parse pubdate, but not sure it will work everywhere.

[sof]

I don't mind putting in a rfc822-like parser like that, but it won't be sufficient in general. (And I really don't want to take on providing reliable parsing of feed dates.)

So, how about:

getItemPublishDate :: ItemGetter (Maybe Date)
getItemPublishDateString :: ItemGetter DateString

with the former returning Nothing if there isn't a pub date, but (Just Nothing) if it was unparseable. And documented as only supporting RFC822.

[sof]

40dfafe

[joeyh]

Seems to me this at least also needs to support RFC3339 dates as used in Atom.

[sof]

Slippery slope.. pull request?

[sof]

8284671