Invalid date recognition

[krojew]

fuzzydate() function incorrectly guesses date due to invalid regex pattern. For example, let's look at "Trollahaugen 64" text. First, it tries to convert it to date and it ends up being 01.01.1964 due to 64 at the end. Then it proceeds with looking for a month using /jan|feb|mar|apr|may|jun|jul|aug|sep|oct|nov|dec/ regex. This is the source of error, since the text contains "aug" inside but it's not a separate word, hence should not be considered a month. Yet, the function assumes it is and returns 01.01.1964.

[SheetJSDev]

Just so we're on the same page: the root problem is the incredible flexibility of the Date constructor in V8 and other JS engines. In chrome, new Date("Trollahaugen 64") is interpreted as the beginning of the year 1964 (Jan 1 0:00 local time).

There are a handful of workarounds for common cases we've seen but it's not pretty. The "right" answer is to skip the date constructor entirely and just regex against a series of culture-specific formats

[krojew]

I understand the inherent problem with solving such issue - there always will be some edge cases. Working around this particular one seems to be trivial - simply expect the month name to be a whole word, surrounded with non-alphabetic characters, if we assume (which might not be true) that the string is a ECMA-262 Date.toString() representation.

[tophsic]

Hi, I had a similar issue with "SEPEM GRENOBLE 2018" text which is transformed in 9/1/18 date.

[SheetJSDev]

Moving the discussion to #1300

@krojew The spec uses the phrase "implementation-dependent":

in general, the value produced by Date.parse is implementation-dependent when given any String value that does not conform to the Date Time String Format

That Date Time String Format is related to ISO 8601 and does not cover the set of date expressions understood by Excel