Request for support for ISO/other date formats about distill HOT 7 CLOSED

blogdown doesn't parse the date; Hugo does. Hugo's documentation didn't seem to say what kind of date formats are accepted, but it seems to favor ISO (either 2017-01-07T00:00:00Z or 2017-01-07 is fine).

Given the endless pain with dealing with ambiguous date formats, personally I'd vote for ISO as the input format, too, and let users choose the display formats by themselves.

from distill.

Hi,

I back up Rao on this, the format you ask for is not scientific, not inclusive (USA only), and it will bring interoperability problems (blogdown requires iso formated dates, for instance).

So if you can change it, please do !

from distill.

Okay, so as things currently stand we can parse ISO dates. However, date output is controlled by Distill and always of the form Jan. 7, 2017

from distill.

I think this is now resolved and the date can be specified in the YAML field as YYYY-MM-DD.

from distill.

Yes, the tricky thing is that we'd need to try parsing the date a bunch of different ways. One further issue is that you really need to know in advance whether it's MM-DD or DD-MM (as otherwise you might transpose interpretation of days and months). As a result it's often better to require a specific format.

In terms of display output that's of course completely orthogonal so we could make that fix no matter what we do with input.

from distill.

Thanks for the prompt reply, @jjallaire!

[…] As a result it's often better to require a specific format.

In terms of display output that's of course completely orthogonal so we could make that fix no matter what we do with input.

Indeed, I was proposing that the specific format be YYYY-MM-DD. :) Perhaps the second option under date could allow the user to display it in the format of their choice. :)

I'm sure this will be some work for you, so please don't consider my request particularly high priority!

from distill.

@yihui What date format(s) do you parse from the date field in blogdown?

It looks like we already support parsing dates in ymd format via lubridate::ymd: https://github.com/rstudio/radix/blob/master/R/utils.R#L54-L63

In terms of display of dates, that's actually currently handled by Distill (the framework that Radix is based upon) but we could try to override what they are doing.

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