parsing dates

[Michael Kay]

I don't know if eXist has any schema support. If it does, you can define a
type genericDate that is a union of xs:date, xs:gYearMonth, and xs:gYear.
You can't cast to the union type (sadly) but you can construct an element
and validate against a schema that defines the element as a union type, and
then atomize.

OK, that's a bit longwinded. Sorry!

Regards,

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
http://twitter.com/michaelhkay 
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: http://x-query.com/mailman/listinfo/talk 
> [mailto:http://x-query.com/mailman/listinfo/talk] On Behalf Of James Cummings
> Sent: 06 October 2009 00:05
> To: http://x-query.com/mailman/listinfo/talk
> Subject:  parsing dates
> 
> Hi there,
> 
> I've a silly question about the best way to parse dates.  I'm 
> passing a parameter (in eXist) that is part of the URL for an 
> xquery and I want to separate it into its individual parts of 
> year month and day. I could test the string and do 
> substring-before and after and such, or create my own 
> function, but it seemed better practice to use the functions 
> like year-from-date and month-from-date.  So I tried:
> 
> let $date := request:get-parameter("date", ("1789-01-01")) 
> cast as xs:date let $year := fn:year-from-date($date) let 
> $month := fn:month-from-date($date) let $day := 
> fn:day-from-date($date)
> 
> which works fine when the date is YYYY-MM-DD.  But what I 
> want to achieve is being able to handle YYYY-MM-DD, YYYY-MM 
> or just YYYY.  The last two give me an error of "xs:date must 
> not have hour, minute or second fields set" (erm... which it 
> doesn't, which is why I'm confused). I'm happy for $month and 
> $day to be empty if they don't exist.
> 
> I'm sure it is something terribly obvious with the datatype.  
> Should I just be breaking it down to its component parts 
> myself?  It just seemed like I was reinventing the wheel.
> 
> Thanks for any suggestions.
> 
> -James
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