Support all BibLaTeX date formats for parsing

[LinusDietz]

This would be a followup for #2731, which was at #2731 (comment) by @Siedlerchr:

• Provide for complete biblatex support for parsing Dates

A PR would have to investigate possible date patterns from the standard and then implement them with some tests

[tobiasdiez]

Further examples that should be parsed successful:
November 2013 and January 31 2005

[Siedlerchr]

Some examples from the biblatex manual, Section 2.3.8.

Biblatex follows the EDTF-Standard

[wujastyk]

I don't know if this report belongs here under #2753, because I think it's not about date parsing as such, but about the entry editor. But here goes:

Biblatex permits strings in the date field of the form "1899~" and "1899?" and even "1899?~". The current snapshot of JabRef doesn't allow such strings to be entered in the "Required fields" tab. If one tries, then the content of the field disappears. But one can enter the strings in the "biblatex source" tab. And the data is preserved and even displays in the "required fields" tab.

Desired behaviour: allow the entry editor's "Required fields" tab to accept "date" field strings in all legal Biblatex formats, including Biblatex's "Enhanced date specifications" as listed in the Biblatex manual, table 5 (as well as tables 3, mentioned in the previous post @Siedlerchr, and 4 "unspecified date parsing").

Best,
Dominik

JabRef 4.0-dev--snapshot--2017-07-19--master--2f12fecfb
Linux 4.8.0-58-generic amd64
Java 1.8.0_131

[crystalfp]

JabRef 4.0-beta3
Windows 10 10.0 amd64
Java 1.8.0_131
Check integrity complains on this data field: 2008-07/2008-08 (JabRef more: biblatex)
It is a journal article published on the July/August 2008 issue.
The complete entry is:

@Article{Carr2008,
  author       = {Nicholas Carr},
  title        = {Is Google Making Us Stupid?},
  journaltitle = {The Atlantic},
  date         = {2008-07/2008-08},
  url          = {http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/},
}

Thanks!
mario

[moewew]

Please note that the EDTF draft standard has been superseded by the upcoming ISO8601 novella, so biblatex will cease to support EDTF format and will move to ISO8601. biblatex 3.9 has a deprecation notice for EDTF out and the next release (due in a few days/weeks) will support the new ISO8601 syntax and drop support for EDTF.
The changes are backwards incompatible, but we hope that they were niche enough that this does not cause too many problems. Only a few rarely-used bits of EDTF are not ISO8601 compatible.
Since ISO8601 has not been released yet, that could mean that things have to change later on. This might happen with only short notice from the biblatex/Biber side.

See https://github.com/plk/biblatex/wiki

[Siedlerchr]

@moewew Thank you very much for your information, helps a lot. So I suggest we make us compatible.
Here is the current draft: ISO8601-2 Clause 4, Level 1 Extended Format
https://www.loc.gov/standards/datetime/ISO_DIS%208601-2.pdf

Summary:

4.1.1 Extended format
For features described in this part of ISO 8601, Clause 4, only the extended format (YYYY-MM-DD) SHALL BE used. Basic format (YYYYMMDD) SHALL NOT be used.

The character '?' (question mark) is used to mean "uncertain". The character '~' (tilde) is used to mean "approximate". The character '%’ (percent) is used to mean “both uncertain and approximate".
“Uncertain” and/or “approximate” may apply to full representations as well as representation with reduced precision.
4.2.1 Level 1
For level 1, ‘?,’ ‘~’, or ‘%’ may only occur at the end of the date string, and it applies to the entire date

4.3 Unspecified
The character 'X' may be used as a replacement character, in place of a digit to indicate that the value of that digit is unspecified.
4.3.1 Level 1
The replacement character ‘X’ may be substituted for the right-most digits in the following cases:

Year and month specified, day unspecified.

Year specified, day and month unspecified.

Entire date unspecifie

[moewew]

In case you want to read up on what PLK has done to implement these changes, a few comments are scattered in plk/biblatex#540, plk/biblatex#644, plk/biblatex#656. The dev branch of biblatex has the changes for ISO8601 applied, so you can have a look at the documentation and change files there.

[LinusDietz]

We decided in the devcall, that we follow the Biblatex team and use the new ISO8601 standard without backwards compatibility to EDTF. https://github.com/plk/biblatex/wiki

Addtionally, there is an EBNF in Annex A in the spec doc:
https://www.loc.gov/standards/datetime/ISO_DIS%208601-2.pdf

[LinusDietz]

this doesn't make sense @LinusDietz

[GuyPuts]

Would like to take this issue.

[ThiloteE]

Meanwhile, newest development version of JabRef uses JDK 19. See d3bb827

[Siedlerchr]

Current state: the: The following date formats do not yet work and need to be added and tested and the parsing might need to be adjusted

   "u G",                                  // covers 1 BC
   "u G / u G",                            // covers 30 BC / 5 AD
    "uuuu G / uuuu G",                      // covers 0030 BC / 0005 AD
    "uuuu-MM G / uuuu-MM G",                // covers 0030-01 BC / 0005-02 AD
     "u'-'",                                 // covers 2015-
     "u'?'",                                 // covers 2023?
         

[XiaotongHe123]

Hi, I'm interested in this issue and would love to work on it. Can I get assigned to this issue?

[ThiloteE]

Sure, go ahead :-)

[github-actions]

As a general advice for newcomers: check out Contributing for a start. Also, guidelines for setting up a local workspace is worth having a look at.

Feel free to ask here at GitHub, if you have any issue related questions. If you have questions about how to setup your workspace use JabRef's Gitter chat. Try to open a (draft) pull-request early on, so that people can see you are working on the issue and so that they can see the direction the pull request is heading towards. This way, you will likely receive valuable feedback.