403955 - Parse invalid RFC 2822 dates in RSS feeds

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(MailNews Core :: Feed Reader, enhancement)

Description

[Twisted.Strife]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.9) Gecko/20071025 Firefox/2.0.0.9
Build Identifier: version 2.0.0.9 (20071031)

Date in the following form "<pubDate>do, 15 nov 2007 20:54:00 +0100</pubDate>" (a localized form) aren't parsed by Thunderbird and are defaulted to the date/time the items in the feed gets downloaded. Other RSS readers seem able to parse this date format.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. use this feed http://rss.vrtnieuws.net/cm/vrtnieuws.net/nieuws/binnenland
2. get all the items
3. all items will have the defaulted date
Actual Results:  
Defaulted dates

Expected Results:  
The date on which the items was actually published.

Comment 1

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

That's not "a localized form," it's an invalid form. Hate the format or not, RFC 822/2822 dates have an English day of the week abbreviation, not whatever someone wants to use.

We certainly *can* write an imaginative date parser, separate from the correct one that's used for mail, like other feed readers have (I know Mark Pilgrim's quite proud of the way the Universal Feed Parser will recognize "Κυρ, 11 Ιούλ 2004 12:00:00 EST" as a date), or, we can hope that feedvalidator.org will have a stronger effect on what people produce than "well, it works in *my* feed reader" has.

Comment 2

[zug_treno]

Duplicate of/related to bug 333547?

Comment 4

[alta88]

the 'invalid' sentiment in comment 1 should be reflected in the bug resolution..  especially since the successor to that url does dates correctly now.