Re: Date Formats

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Tue, 2006-03-14 at 17:16 +0000, Phill Gillespie wrote:
> How do you change the formats of the dates within glom?

Glom tries to just use the "correct" format for your locale. Specifying
a particular format should be unnecessary and it would just be
irritating to people using the same file in a different locale (This is
a common annoyance when exchanging Excel or FileMaker files.)

>   I've added a 
> new date field and it takes the date I enter (in my British locale) as 
> dd/mm/yyyy and it strips of the final two year digits and prefixes it 
> with 19, e.g.  13/01/1977 becomes 1913-01-19.

Is this what you see in Postgres or what you see in Glom?

Does it make any difference when you use 01 instead of 1 (at least, or
exactly, 2 digits for each part)?

>   PostgreSQL has the type 
> correctly listed as date.

I think that's more a case of completely wrong date parsing. We don't
need a "make it work" option. It should just work. Please file a bug
with exact details, and I'll try it with a British locale some time.

GlomConversions::parse_date() is the code that does this, by the way.

> Additionally there only seems space to display two digits for the year, 
> regardless of where it appears in the string!

Yes, that annoys me too. I'd like to enforce 4-digit display and entry
of years. Unfortunately I don't see a way to tell C++ or C to just 
"format the date appropriately for the locale, with 4 digits for the
year." std::time_put<char>::put(), with a format of 'x', uses 2 digits.

GlomConversions::format_date() does this, by the way.

Sounds like a separate bug that should be opened. We'll fix it, even if
it's difficult.

>   In the screenshots in the 
> wiki there your date of birth looks as I would expect but on my system 
> it's quite messed up :-(

Thanks for the feedback. 
-- 
Murray Cumming
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com