>-----Original Message----- >From: Zefram [mailto:zef...@fysh.org] >Sent: 25 April 2012 11:04 >To: Carl Vincent >Cc: datetime@perl.org >Subject: Re: ISO 8601 Format YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss.sss[+-]hhmm > >Carl Vincent wrote: >>I can't see a case where the lack of a colon in the time offset >>introduces ambiguity in the parsing. It may be poor style, but it's not >>necessarily broken. > >You've got to be careful about this sort of thing when there's an >actual standard. Once you start accepting something that's not really >conforming, generators start relying on it being accepted, and then >get surprised when stricter parsers reject it, and the usefulness of >the standard to everyone is thus reduced. The permissiveness that you >ask for is not free of cost. Look at what happened historically to the >dotted-octet representation of IPv4 addresses, described in some detail >at <http://www.fysh.org/~zefram/text_rep/draft-main-ipaddr-text-rep.txt>. > >>Since these formats are out there in use, it would be better for the >>module to parse them > >Best for *a* module to parse them. A module that doesn't claim that >they're actually ISO 8601 formats, and by extension probably not the >module with "ISO8601" in its name. "DateTime::Format::SalesForce" >is available.
I understand your concern, although a proliferation of slight variation modules will create confusion in it's own way. I'll attempt to construct a new module to parse the format. Do you have any reference from the official standard to this consistency issue in the format? If so, I can take it up with Salesforce, since they claim they're standards compliant and that's what's causing my pain. Regards Carl
