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

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

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

> This is org 9.4 running from maint (commit ab00524fc). I spent a while
> stepping through org-capture and org-read-date but haven't found the
> problem yet. I suspect this snippet from a cond form in the middle of
> org-capture-set-target-location:
>
> #+begin_src
>     ((string-match "\\([^ ]+\\)-[^ ]+[ ]+\\(.*\\)"
>                     org-read-date-final-answer)
>         ;; Replace any time range by its start.
>         (apply #'encode-time
>             (org-read-date-analyze
>                 ;; it looks to me like this is maybe sending the wrong value
>                 ;; into org-read-date-analyze: 
>                 (replace-match "\\1 \\2" nil nil  
>                                org-read-date-final-answer)
>
> #+end_src

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.  If I comment out this branch of
the cond form, and enter "12-31 13:00" at the org-read-date-prompt, then
both the timestamp and the location in the datetree are correct.

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. Should
it be checking for "am"/"pm" or ":" or similar? Otherwise it seems
impossible to distinguish a date specification like "11-12" from a time
range. 

-- 
Best,
Richard