Re: Shorter and more flexible implementation for parse-time.el

[Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>]

"Guu, Jin-Cheng" <jcguu95@gmail.com> writes:

> Thanks for your response! I've done some research, and the formats I
> have seen all have their rigid formats (with a fixed length in
> particular) [1][2][3]. Would you mind pointing me to some exceptions?
> I can try to accommodate.

There's a million formats out there, like "3-NOV-94" etc in various
permutations.

> That said, I'd argue it is still useful. It is much shorter, is
> flexible and customizable, and uses lisp sexprs instead of a
> DSL. Please feel free to let me know what it lacks of, I will try to
> work on it and present a final result. =)

My experience is that there is no DSL that can cover date parsing that's
handier than just writing some code, unfortunately.  Your library covers
the 

(encode-time
 (mapcar (lambda (bit)
	   (if bit
	       (string-to-number bit)
	     0))
	 (list nil nil nil (substring string 0 2)
               (substring string 2 4)
               (substring string 4 8))))

etc case, and that's not where the hard thing in date parsing is.

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