1175778 - Date.parse chokes on a period after abbreviated month

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: JavaScript: Standard Library, enhancement)

Description

[Jonah Bishop]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/38.0
Build ID: 20150525141253

Steps to reproduce:

The Date.parse() routine can't handle a period after an abbreviated name, which occurs in the Associated Press style date format (e.g. "Aug.", "Sept.", "Oct.", etc). I found this while debugging a Django application (Django uses AP format by default for date fields).

Chrome and IE 11 both handle the periods just fine.


Actual results:

Date.parse('Aug. 15, 2015') // Results in NaN


Expected results:

A valid value should be returned.

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Lovely.  The spec says:

  The function first attempts to parse the format of the String according to the rules
  (including extended years) called out in Date Time String Format (20.3.1.16). If the
  String does not conform to that format the function may fall back to any
  implementation-specific heuristics or implementation-specific date formats.
  Unrecognizable Strings or dates containing illegal element values in the format String
  shall cause Date.parse to return NaN.

So per spec our behavior is totally fine.  Gotta love not-so-useful specs.  :(

Comment 2

[Jonathan Watt [:jwatt]]

Mass bug change to replace various 'parity' whiteboard flags with the new canonical keywords. (See bug 1443764 comment 13.)

Comment 3

[Vinny Diehl]

This is fixed trivially by ignoring '.' at the top level of the parse loop, as we do with commas and spaces. I have a patch incoming. :)

Comment 4

[Vinny Diehl]

Attachment: Bug 1175778 - Allow '.' in `Date.parse` r?arai

Comment 5

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/331879c52f18
Allow '.' in `Date.parse` r=arai

Comment 6

[Cristian Tuns]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/331879c52f18