# Sales pitch

If you've ever had to parse datetime input from multiple sources and everyone's standardized on ISO8601, you might have found out that that's not quite as standard as you'd wish. This is where datefmt helps you.

---
import datefmt;
auto expected = SysTime(Date(2010, 1, 1), UTC());
foreach (date; ["2010-01-01", "2010-01-01T00:00:00", "2010-01-01 00:00:00.000Z"])
{
  SysTime parsed;
  assert(tryParse(date, ISO8601FORMAT, parsed));
  assert(expected == parsed);
}
---


# How does datefmt's parsing differ from dateparser?

dateparser is great when you have a date that's in some arbitrary format and you want to turn it into a sensible date. It's perfect for manual input.

datefmt is good when you have a restricted set of formats you need to accept and want to reject everything else -- generally when a wide range of systems using the same somewhat nebulous standard emit the stuff you need to parse.


# What about formatting?

datefmt can do formatting too! Most of its formatting options are taken from strftime, so it should be generally familiar.

And of course you can use predefined formats for RFC1123 and ISO8601:

auto st = SysTime(DateTime(2010, 4, 12, 15, 30, 00), UTC());
writeln(st.format(ISO8601FORMAT));
// 2010-04-12T15:30:00.000000Z
writeln(st.format(RFC1123FORMAT));
// Mon, 12 Apr 2010 15:30:00 Z


# Is anyone using it?

I've been using this in my RSS reader for the past month or two, during which time it's been exposed to a number of horrible variants of both RFC1123 and ISO8601.


# How do I get it?

Add "datefmt": "~>1.0.0" to your dub.json and Bob's your uncle!

Or download the single file from https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dhasenan/datefmt/master/source/datefmt.d and put it in your project.

Licensed under MS-PL (BSD-style permissive license with patent grant); open an issue at https://github.com/dhasenan/datefmt/issues if you need a different license.

On Tuesday, 12 December 2017 at 22:51:07 UTC, Neia Neutuladh wrote:
> # Sales pitch
>
> If you've ever had to parse datetime input from multiple sources and everyone's standardized on ISO8601, you might have found out that that's not quite as standard as you'd wish. This is where datefmt helps you.
>
> [...]

Nice.  These little packages are very use for someone like me doing serverside development... Dealing with dates and client data.

Why not use Boost license. It makes everything easy for everyone

On Tuesday, 12 December 2017 at 22:51:07 UTC, Neia Neutuladh wrote:
> # Sales pitch
>
> If you've ever had to parse datetime input from multiple sources and everyone's standardized on ISO8601, you might have found out that that's not quite as standard as you'd wish. This is where datefmt helps you.

Oh yes, thank you! +1

I think you should add some way to translate days/month in other language.

Andrea

On Monday, 18 December 2017 at 09:03:09 UTC, Andrea Fontana wrote:
> I think you should add some way to translate days/month in other language.

That would be great! Unfortunately, it requires a decent locales library.