Date.parse() falls down a lot

[danmactough]

Date.parse() falls down a lot

[danmactough]

Thanks, Russ. I'm on the fence about this. I have this personal reaction, "If the publisher can't be bothered to publish valid data, then wtf do I care?!" But, feedparser is a library, not my application, so I can see where being more liberal in what we receive is the way to go here. If I can simply plug in moment.js and have "slightly invalid" dates work (such as in your example feed), then I'm cool with that. SimplePie's script is ridiculous, though.

[rdbcci]

At the least, in these edge cases, it seems best to not throw away original data in case somebody wants it.

[russellbeattie]

Just to get some real numbers, I went through the 14,178 feeds I have right now and only 149 of them returned null in the pubdate. Rechecking those feeds gave me only a handful that were badly formatted, the rest are just non-existant.

So sorry - it doesn't seem to be as big of a deal as I initially thought. I ran into the spinner.ca thing early and assumed it would be more common, but it doesn't look that way. I don't think it's a an issue any more.

Thanks again!

[danmactough]

@russellbeattie Russ, thanks for following up. I still wouldn't object if moment could make the date parsing more reliable.

[danmactough]

@rdbcci The original data is always in the un-normalized property. For example, with an Atom 1.0 feed, each post's "pubdate" property would have the normalized Date object (unless it cannot be parsed), and the "atom:published" property would retain whatever string was in the feed.