Re: ISO 8601 Format YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss.sss[+-]hhmm

Carl Vincent wrote:
>I can't see a case where the lack of a colon in the time offset
>introduces ambiguity in the parsing. It may be poor style, but it's not
>necessarily broken.

You've got to be careful about this sort of thing when there's an
actual standard.  Once you start accepting something that's not really
conforming, generators start relying on it being accepted, and then
get surprised when stricter parsers reject it, and the usefulness of
the standard to everyone is thus reduced.  The permissiveness that you
ask for is not free of cost.  Look at what happened historically to the
dotted-octet representation of IPv4 addresses, described in some detail
at <http://www.fysh.org/~zefram/text_rep/draft-main-ipaddr-text-rep.txt>.

>Since these formats are out there in use, it would be better for the
>module to parse them

Best for *a* module to parse them.  A module that doesn't claim that
they're actually ISO 8601 formats, and by extension probably not the
module with "ISO8601" in its name.  "DateTime::Format::SalesForce"
is available.

-zefram