Re: date not parsing full iso-8601

[Jos Backus]

On Fri, Jul 22, 2005 at 10:23:48AM -0700, Paul Eggert wrote:
> > Note that I haven't read the actual standards document. But if that is the
> > case, then how can the following be valid formats according to Markus Kuhn's
> > document (which w3.org links to, btw)?
> 
> Because Markus Kuhn doesn't like the "T" either.  I don't know of
> anybody who likes the "T" for output that is intended to be
> human-readable.  However, I believe "T" (or "t") is required by ISO
> 8601, for the representation of the date and time in a single output.
> See, for example, <http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/iso8601.html>.

You're right, it _is_ required:

<quote>
Combined date and time format 
    Use a format where the date designation is followed by the letter T and
    the time of the day designation, e.g. 1998-05-12T14:15Z. Note that the
    standard clearly requires the use of T in this context. However, such a
    notation is often regarded as odd-looking, and people who otherwise use
    ISO 8601 might deviate from it here by using a space instead.
</quote>

Odd-looking indeed. :-)

> I should mention that the command:
> 
>   date -d `date -i`
> 
> should work under this proposal, without any changes to the
> date-parsing code executed by date -d.  That's one reason I'm
> proposing this.

This is exactly the capability I'm looking for. Thanks again Paul.

-- 
Jos Backus
jos at catnook.com