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Bugs item #1656884, was opened at 2007-02-10 18:31
Message generated for change (Comment added) made by blacktav
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Category: None
Group: None
Status: Open
Resolution: None
Priority: 5
Private: No
Submitted By: Drew Ferguson (blacktav)
Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)
Summary: Bad dbf date field strings

Initial Comment:
Hi

Thanks for a life-saver project

An application I have (SwissPerfect) stores bad date strings formatted with spaces including incomplete dates (eg year only).

Attached is a diff on utils.py 2.1.0 with a function to parse such bad date strings and fix them

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>Comment By: Drew Ferguson (blacktav)
Date: 2007-02-10 23:10

Message:
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Hi Alex

Wow, quick response! Thanks

Trap for embedded spaces is fine but partial dates (eg year only)
continues to barf.

Yes, enforcing a valid (python) date is not good. Even with access to
"broken" raw data this is a scary can-of-worms; expecting a valid python
date from applications which evidently permit partial dates (by accident
or design) isn't good either.

I hit another issue too where a numeric field barfs on int(value) with
"null byte in argument for int()" I presume this is bad data too.

I can't see easy long-term fixes here so I guess I'll live with my hacks
and wish you the best. Again, thanks for all your hard-work in dbfpy, and
allowing my hacks to be trivial to implement.

If you want the broken source data files let me know.

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Comment By: alexander smishlajev (a1s)
Date: 2007-02-10 19:58

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yet another quick fix: i've added API to access raw DBF data.  with
current version you can catch conversion errors and then obtain offending
values as::

    dbf.header[field_name_or_number].decodeFromRecord(
        rec.rawFromStream(dbf, record_index))

where rec may be DbfRecord class or any valid record object.

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Comment By: alexander smishlajev (a1s)
Date: 2007-02-10 19:03

Message:
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thank you for reporting it.  it's a +1 for the plan to make the Dbf class
to optionally ignore all conversion errors, as i said in
https://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=37890707

however, i am not given to "fix" invalid values by replacing missing date
parts by an arbitrary number.  perhaps returning None instead of invalid
dates would be more consistent...

i have checked in a quick fix allowing date strings to have leading spaces
instead of zeroes.  if that solves your problem, i will release new dbfpy
version as soon as possible.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

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