Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!decwrl!world!geoff From: geoff@world.std.com (Geoff Collyer) Newsgroups: news.software.b Subject: Re: The anomolous handling of bad dates in cnews. Message-ID: <1991May24.050525.9055@world.std.com> Date: 24 May 91 05:05:25 GMT References: <1991May23.115029.10971@mp.cs.niu.edu> <91May23.151914edt.1030@smoke.cs.toronto.edu> <1991May24.032746.1237@mp.cs.niu.edu> Organization: Software Tool & Die Netnews Research Center Lines: 18 rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes: >Most of the bad dates are probably from mailers, often due to unknown time zones. Our date parsers, getindate and getabsdate, don't fault a date for an unknown time zone. Alphabetic time zones are so utterly arbitrary and unknown ones are so common that the date parsers just ignore an unknown time zone. I think we can cope with the mailers. Most bad dates seem empirically to be either non-822 dates supplied by news systems where 822 dates are required, or wildly ambiguous crud from people, like 5/6/7 (just imagine the possibilities for confusion in the next decade, taking into account differing conventions for all-numeric dates in different countries). getabsdate can parse pretty much any unambiguous absolute date, including some that getdate can't parse or misunderstands; see libc/getabsdate.3 for details. -- Geoff Collyer world.std.com!geoff, uunet.uu.net!geoff