Re: date parsing of european dates

[James Youngman]

On Fri, May 13, 2005 at 01:30:35AM +0100, Nic Ferrier wrote:

> GNU date does not allow the date parsing pattern to be specified on
> the command line.     [ or with an environment variable ]

I believe this is true.

> Thus:
> 
>    $  LC_TIME=en_GB.utf8 date --date "12/05/2005"
>    Mon Dec  5 00:00:00 GMT 2005
> but what it should really output is:
>   Thu May 5 00:00:00 BST 2005

Surely, "Thu May 12 00:00:00 BST 2005" ?

> Are my assertions incorrect or is it indeed impossible to parse this
> date with the semantics that I want?

I understand how you feel.  It's like letter paper all over again.
Lots of software written in the USA starts off its life with simple
functional scope and therefore without any appreciation of this kind
of issue.  Even software written in Europe frequently has significant
internationalisation issues (for example lack of working support for
bidi text and the distinction between number-of-bytes and
number-of-characters).  The problem here though is that there's just
one code base in "date" for understanding dates, and the parsing is
not locale aware.

To be fair though, making date's parser truly locale aware is a huge
task.  I'm sure that the coreutils maintainers would be keen to accept
contributions that improved this situation.  If you feel strongly
about this, why not help?  Clearly you feel the issue is important.

In the meantime, why not just use the ISO 8601 format, which cannot
possibly be misunderstood by a program?

$ date --date 2005-05-12
Thu May 12 00:00:00 BST 2005

Regards,
James.