On Wednesday, 21 August 2013 at 06:46:49 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
In general, I'm very much opposed to functions which try and
parse arbitrary
strings as they're incredibly error-prone and have to guess at
what you mean.
In pretty much any case where the string was emitted by a
computer in the first
place rather than a human, that's just plain sloppy, and
ideally, a human
would be required to put a string in a standard format when
inputting it (or
input the values separately rather than as a string) in order
to avoid
intepretation errors.
- Jonathan M Davis
I agree completely and can speak from experience. We used
wxWidget's wxDateTime class for years at work and its
ParseDateTime which allows free format strings. It was a source
of never ending problems for us until we finally stopped using
it. The implementation was fine, it's just that dates are not
amenable to unstructured reading. Date strings with locale
information embedded in them may be doable but they are basically
nonexistent.
Date strings are a lot like string encodings. They are unsafe to
use without knowing a definitive format/encoding.
