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A DateTime from the date strings the web writes — RFC 1123, the older RFC 850, C's asctime, and ISO 8601 — through one constructor that tries the grammars in turn.

Version

0.9.3 github:sergot

Depends

nothing outside the core

License

see the source

Its own test suite

3 files, green

Checked

2026-09-14 against Raku++ 3.28.0 and Rakudo 2026.08

Where it lives

raku.land · source

Install it #

$ rakupp install DateTime::Parse

zef install DateTime::Parse writes the same store; either installer leaves the module usable by both engines.

What it is for #

DateTime.new('2026-09-14T15:04:05Z') works because that is the one format the core understands. An HTTP Date header says Sun, 06 Nov 1994 08:49:37 GMT, a cookie's expires may still say Sunday, 06-Nov-94 08:49:37 GMT, and a log line from a C program says Sun Nov 6 08:49:37 1994 — the three forms RFC 7231 tells a client it must accept. This distribution is a grammar for each with actions that build a DateTime, and a constructor that tries them. It is what HTTP::UserAgent and its relatives use to read a server's headers; five distributions depend on it.

The four forms #

use DateTime::Parse;

say DateTime::Parse.new('Sun, 06 Nov 1994 08:49:37 GMT');
say DateTime::Parse.new('Sun Nov  6 08:49:37 1994');
say DateTime::Parse.new('2026-09-14T15:04:05Z');
say DateTime::Parse.new('Sun, 06 Nov 1994 08:49:37 GMT').^name;
say DateTime::Parse.new('Sunday, 06-Nov-94 08:49:37 GMT').year;
say (try { DateTime::Parse.new('2026-09-14 15:04:05') }) // $!.^name;

1994-11-06T08:49:37Z
1994-11-06T08:49:37Z
2026-09-14T15:04:05Z
DateTime
94
X::DateTime::CannotParse

What comes back is a plain core DateTime — the class is named after the parser, but new returns the parsed value rather than an instance of itself, so nothing downstream has to know where the object came from. A string none of the grammars accept throws X::DateTime::CannotParse with the text in the message. The :timezone option applies an offset in seconds for a format that carries none, and :rule names one grammar to try instead of all of them.

The one thing to know #

The two-digit year is taken literally. RFC 850's 06-Nov-94 is the year 94, not 1994 — the fifth line above — because the grammar reads the digits into the year field and nothing adds the century. The format was obsolete before the module was written and still turns up in cookies from old servers, so if you read cookie expiry dates, check .year < 100 and add 1900 or 2000 by RFC 6265's rule (69 and up is the twentieth century) before trusting the result. Nothing else in the module has this problem; the other three forms carry four digits.

The space-separated ISO form, 2026-09-14 15:04:05, is not one of the four: only the T spelling is accepted, so a timestamp from a database export needs its space turned into a T first.