From: "Martin J. Dürst" <duerst@...>
Date: 2009-11-27T19:31:15+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:26924] Re: [Bug #2378] Regression in ParseDate.parsedate('nn-nn')

On 2009/11/25 23:29, Rick DeNatale wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 9:59 PM, Hiro Asari<redmine@ruby-lang.org>  wrote:
>> Issue #2378 has been updated by Hiro Asari.
>>
>>
>> I beg to differ. If you tell 100 programmers that "11-09" is some combination of date and time, I wager that the vast majority will answer: "November 9th", "11th of September" or "November, 2009", maybe "2011 September".
>>
>> Maybe we should only support ISO 8601, in which case "nn-nn" seems invalid (please correct me if I'm wrong).
>
> ISO 8601 is really for computer interchange of time date information
> as I understand it.
>
> That's important, but most use cases of date parsing would I think
> deal with parsing user input, and that has to deal with the vagaries
> of world culture:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_by_country
>
> To most non-Americans 9/11 means September 11, but to the rest of the

I think that should read "To most Americans 9/11 means September 11".

> world it means November 9.   Personally when I write dates I tend to
> write either 11 September or 9 November for this reason.
>
> Ruby 1.8 tried to deal with this with heuristics, but I realize that
> the problem is pretty hard,

Yes. "pretty hard" is a strong understatement, actually.

Regards,   Martin.


-- 
#-# Martin J. D�rst, Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-# http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp   mailto:duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp