can parse invalid dates

[belt]

One might expect Chronic.parse('30 February 2011') to yield nil... as there never a 30'th of February... yet it yields 02 March 2011.

30 days hath September, April, June and November

Same-ish goes for the "31st" of those 4 months too yielding the 1st of the following month.

Same-ish goes for Chronic.parse('31 February 2011') yielding 03 March 2011... and the 29th of February yielding the 1st of March on non-leap years.

[leejarvis]

This is actually because of how the Ruby Time class deals with day overflows. An example:

>> Time.local(2011, 2, 31)
=> 2011-03-03 00:00:00 +0000
>> Chronic.parse('31 feb 2011') == Time.local(2011, 2, 31, 12)
=> true

The Time class raises an ArgumentError when a day is past 31 (of course it's not possible to have a day later than 31 in any month), but if it's later than the last day of said month, the month will be incremented and days will be added from the start of this month. Chronic has always relied on this functionality be it a feature or a hinderance.

The internals of Chronic don't actually care what 31 is (in certain sense). It's relative information. In this case 31 represents 31 days from the beginning of February, which of course, if you count it, is 03/03/2011 (unless it's a leap year).

I'll have a think about this and leave this issue open for discussion, because I do agree with you. Libraries shouldn't rely on this functionality but it's how Chronic has always done it, so there's always that one exception to the rule.

[leejarvis]

Summoning @mojombo on this discussion. We can go one of 3 ways:

• Return nil when an out of month day is supplied
• Raise when an out of month day is supplied
• Add a :strict option, disabled by default, which will raise when an out of month day is supplied