Re: parsing a date

[Óscar Fuentes]

Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:

>>> Which is not acceptable to `encode-time', because it requires integers,
>>> not nil. I can't believe this is quite this complicated: do I really
>>> have to replace all the nils with 0 myself?
>>
>> (mapcar (lambda (x) (if x x 0)) (parse-time-string "2011-11-15"))
>
> Sure, it's doable, but it just seems odd that `parse-time-string'
> returns a structure that `encode-time' can't read!

I guess that the designers chose to differenciate among `zero' and `not
specified' on the output of parse-time-string.

As for `encode-time', it takes each date-time component as an argument,
not the output of parse-time-string, which is a list. OTOH,
`encode-time' could interpret arguments with value `nil' as `zero'.