standardize date and time across messages

[DiogoGoto]

I notice that messages like GNRMC has a date and time attributes, but GNZDA has a time attribute and NO date attribute, so as suggestion, you could standardize the same date and time format for all messages that have this information available.

[semuadmin]

Hi @DiogoGoto

I'm not entirely clear what the ask is here? The message definitions are dictated by the NMEA 0183 protocol.

pynmeagps renders all non-blank time ('TM') attributes as datetime.time and all non-blank date ('DT') attributes as datetime.date, which seems fairly intuitive.

How, specifically, would you prefer to see the ZDA message parsed?

[DiogoGoto]

I guess I phrased it poorly, what I mean is that some messages contains similar information, like the both rmc and zda contains date and time information, but zda has the date information in separate fields so why not add date or datetime object, even if not specified in the nmea standard itself. This would make easier to check some common data that is available in multiple messages

[semuadmin]

OK so AFAICS this is only relevant to the two specific message types you reference - RMC and ZDA - the vast majority of NMEA GNSS messages do not contain a date in any format. I'm not convinced there's much utility in providing an additional datetime attribute for these specific messages - it's not a great hardship for the end user to reassamble a complete datetime in Python if there's a compelling need to do so e.g. for ZDA:

dt = datetime(msg.year, msg.month, msg.day, msg.time.hour, msg.time.minute, msg.time.second)

But I'm happy to be convinced otherwise if there's a wider appetite.