Parsing ISO 8601 Dates in Flex

Flex has many capabilities, but parsing dates is not one of them. As a member of the JSR-310 team I am focused on date formatting and parsing across many formats, so it comes as a bit of a surprise that Flex has very little support for this. I guess it's time to roll my own.

Unlike Java date formatters, Flex doesn't let you set the parse format to accept custom inputs. The formats must match one of the seven standard parse formats that Flex supports. Some third party examples try to use Date.parse() after massaging the input string, but they are a bit lame.

A good way to parse dates in Flex is to use RegExp to extract the numbers. Then, the numbers need to be validated prior to assignment. First, lets look at a few code snippets to see how to pull the numbers out of a local date (no time zone offset).

// ISO 8601 date time as YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss.SSS
var dateTimeArray:Array = inputDate.split('T')
var dateString:String = dateTimeArray[0]
var timeString:String = dateTimeArray[1]

// parse the date from YYYY-MM-DD
var pattern:RegExp = /(^\d{4})-(\d{2})-(\d{2}$)/
var result:Object = pattern.exec( dateString )
if (result == null)
  throw(new Error("invalid date format"))

var year:uint = new uint( result[1] )
var month:uint = new uint( result[2] )
var day:uint = new uint( result[3] )

if (!validateDate(year, month, day))
   throw(new Error("invalid date format"))

var date:Date = new Date(year, month - 1, day, 0, 0, 0, 0)

// now parse the time from HH:MM:SS.SSS
pattern = /(^\d{2}):(\d{2}):(\d{2}).(\d{3})/
result = pattern.exec( timeString )
if (result == null)
   throw(new Error("invalid time format"))

var hour:uint = new uint( result[1] )
var minute:uint = new uint( result[2] )
var second:uint = new uint( result[3] )
var milli:uint = new uint( result[4] )

if (!validateTime(hour, minute, second, milli))
   throw(new Error("invalid time format"))

date.setHours(hour, minute, second, milli)

Lenient Dates and Times: It appears that in Flex world, March 32nd == April 1st. And April 2nd at 25 hours == April 3rd at 1am. Is this an April fools joke? No, it's just the lenient way that Flex handles date parameters. No problem with that until you start parsing, then you need to be strict.

Strict Dates: Lets say a vendor sends an electronic invoice to you with a payment due date of 2009-May-31. Does he want his money on June 1st? Probably not. The best response is to reply that his date is invalid and he must submit a valid date.

That's what being strict means. Unfortunately, Flex does not have a way of controlling strict dates, so you need to do this manually.

Validation: Without validation constraints a Flex date can range from 0100-01-01T00:00:00.000 to beyond the year 10,000. Dates earlier than the year 100 are coerced to 1900. This is clearly, not what we want. For parsing purposes there should be a range of minimum/maximum acceptable dates. For discussion purposes, I'll set the range to start at the recognized Gregorian start date of 1582-10-17T00:00:00.000 and end at an arbitrary future date of 2999-12-31:23:59:59.999.

Now that we have a date range, the years are easy, 1582..2999. Months for Flex follow the old C convention of zero indexing, so months range from 0..11 but we will use 1..12 for validation then decrement the month prior to creating the flex Date object.

Days are a bit trickier, but lets use 31 as the default, then 30 for Apr, Jun, Sep, Nov and 28/29 for Feb, after determining the leap year. Here is the standard calculation for leap year lifted from the white book:

var leap = ((year % 4 == 0) && ( !(year % 100 == 0) || (year % 400 == 0)))

Hours, minutes, seconds and milliseconds are bound by 0..23, 0..59, 0..59, and 0..999. This ignores time zone changes and the occasional leap-second, but otherwise works fine.

The Final Code: I created a demo application that allows you to plug in and parse dates and run the unit tests. The demo and source code are available here. I'm still working on a parser for time-zoned dates, but this is a good start.