| 2006-08-31 http://boredzo.org/iso8601parser |
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ISO 8601 provides a standard unambiguous format (several, actually) for dates and times. Unfortunately, NSDateFormatter alone does not completely support ISO 8601; in particular, it does not support week dates or ordinal dates.
This came to my attention when I began writing a patch for Vienna to add support for the ttl element of RSS 2.0 and the updatePeriod, updateFrequency, and updateBase elements of RDF Site Summary 1.0's Syndication module (which it borrowed from Open Content Syndication). The latter prescribes a YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM format for dates. Somehow, I got it into my head that it prescribed ISO 8601 format for dates (as opposed to only the YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM format), which would have meant that NSDateFormatter wouldn't work.
So, that's why I wrote this parser. I won't need it for Vienna, since RSS 1.0 doesn't actually prescribe ISO 8601 format by name (simply one version of it, which should be perfectly doable with plain Cocoa date-formatting techniques). Adium, however, does use ISO 8601 format in its log format, and so this parser/unparser is being used in Adium X 1.0 and later.
Version 0.4 added the ability to specify a custom time separator character instead of ':'. This works on both the parsing and unparsing directions.
Version 0.3 fixed some bugs found by Colin Barrett.
In version 0.2, I added an unparser. Now you can go back and forth between NSCalendarDate and NSString.
MD5 and SHA1 signatures were created using the md5sum(1) and sha1sum(1) utilities from GNU coreutils.
| 2006-08-31 http://boredzo.org/iso8601parser |
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