Re: [xbiblio-devel] Chapters, volumes and editions

[James H. <jho...@sy...>]

On Dec 19, 2007, at 10:59 AM, Julian Onions wrote:

>
> > Shall I attempt an isnumber, isdate variant?
>
> If you could, that would be great. I think isdate might be better for
> dates, although I'm still not entirely sure how it would work. Elena
>
> OK  - will give it a go.
> I assume isdate will return true if the field as a whole parses as a  
> valid date.
> so would be true for 1/1/2001 but false for c.1900-1902

I'm sure you've thought about this but, while 1/1/2001 is unambiguous  
1/2/2001 or similar, is ambiguous (mm/dd or dd/mm?) and therefore  
shouldn't parse as a date (yeah, you could use a person's Locale  
settings but this data could be coming from anywhere, so that would be  
pretty arbitrary).

Perhaps one could flag this somehow in the UI somewhere and have the  
user try to resolve it, but silently parsing it seems a mistake to  
me.  Of course there's only a small range that is ambiguous (20/1/2005  
isn't nor is 2/2005 ie just a month), but worth thinking about, I feel.

Another option might be to just parse the unambiguous parts (in this  
example just the year).

--J

btw, yay for 2005-01-01 format :)