Re: Bug: incorrect timestamps with :time-prompt and datetrees

[Richard Lawrence <richard.lawrence@uni-tuebingen.de>]

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Hi everyone,

Richard Lawrence <richard.lawrence@uni-tuebingen.de> writes:

> I can now confirm that this is the problem. It looks like what is happening here
> is that the regex is meant to match a time range, but ends up matching
> the date: thus a string like "12-31 13:00" gets mangled to "12 13:00"
> and sent into org-read-date-analyze.

> So I guess the solution is...a better regex is needed to cause this
> branch to fire only in the intended case, namely, a time range. 

Here is a patch for this issue. It uses a narrower regex to match a time
range. This regex requires time ranges to have ":MM" or an AM/PM
specification in the end time, to prevent mangling strings that are
interpreted as dates, like "11-12".

This patch is a minimal change that gets the code working in the way
that seems to have been intended, so it seems worth applying to maint.

However, the way the code is intended to work doesn't seem right to me,
because it simply throws away time range information at the time prompt.
If you enter a time range like "13:00-14:00" at the time prompt, you
will get a timestamp with "13:00" for the time when the %T template is
expanded. (This is because org-capture-set-target-location uses the
beginning of the entered time range to set :default-time, which must be
an encoded time value, and there is no obvious way to set a time range.)
This is a surprising contrast with the behavior of %^T, which preserves
the time range information in the timestamp entered. But fixing this
will be a larger change and possibly requires some discussion.

-- 
Best,
Richard


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From a41c751f15488a8b0d48d6b1b1744dbbc003f9f0 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Richard Lawrence <richard.lawrence@berkeley.edu>
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2021 11:53:42 +0100
Subject: [PATCH] org-capture: fix expansion of %T when capturing to a datetree

* org-capture.el (org-capture-set-target-location): Use a narrower
regular expression to replace a time range by its start time when
setting :default-time, so that dates do not get mangled.

TINYCHANGE
---
 lisp/org-capture.el | 4 ++--
 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

diff --git a/lisp/org-capture.el b/lisp/org-capture.el
index f40f2b335..df0eccdbb 100644
--- a/lisp/org-capture.el
+++ b/lisp/org-capture.el
@@ -1038,12 +1038,12 @@ Store them in the capture property list."
 			 (apply #'encode-time 0 0
 				org-extend-today-until
 				(cl-cdddr (decode-time prompt-time))))
-			((string-match "\\([^ ]+\\)-[^ ]+[ ]+\\(.*\\)"
+			((string-match "\\(--?\\([012]?[0-9]\\)\\(\\(:[0-5][0-9]\\)\\|\\(am\\|AM\\|pm\\|PM\\)\\>\\)\\)\\(.*\\)"
 				       org-read-date-final-answer)
 			 ;; Replace any time range by its start.
 			 (apply #'encode-time
 				(org-read-date-analyze
-				 (replace-match "\\1 \\2" nil nil
+				 (replace-match "\\6" nil nil
 						org-read-date-final-answer)
 				 prompt-time (decode-time prompt-time))))
 			(t prompt-time)))
-- 
2.20.1