Why are date strings changed?

[sureshjoshi]

Just started using python-frontmatter, and it's great. It allowed me to switch away from some cobbled together code to something much cleaner - and I'm able to comfortably release knowing I can adjust front-matter as it suits me. Kudos! Though, I did have a question that I have no strong opinions on.

Why are my dates modified automatically from ISO8601? For this project, it doesn't really matter - but it's strange that it happens at all.

date: 2012-10-11T23:39:45-04:00

becomes

date: 2012-10-12 03:39:45

[eyeseast]

No idea! That's interesting, though. I haven't looked closely at how (or if) YAML parses and stringifies dates, but that's where I'd start.

Glad you like the library.

[eyeseast]

Going to chalk this up to YAML's idiosyncrasies. Closing pending further complications.

[merwok]

It is unfortunate that the timezone information is lost. This is not just a cosmetic formatting issue but an unexpected data conversion.

[sureshjoshi]

It's super weird, because I've done some line by line copying of parts of each project - and the result is a DT string with timezone. So, must be something in the glue code.

Having said that, I also haven't tried using the same example files in a long time - because for my case, I really don't care about timezone. Even more, I only care about the date (+/- 1 day)

[eyeseast]

I just ran this code and the result looks correct: https://gist.github.com/eyeseast/28a2df48a67921bba660ef8396088d54

import frontmatter

text = """
---
date: 2012-10-11T23:39:45-04:00
---
Content
"""

post = frontmatter.loads(text)
print(frontmatter.dumps(post))

Output:

---
date: 2012-10-11 23:39:45-04:00
---

Content

So the date formatting changed, but not in a way I'd call incorrect. I ran this on Python 3.9.4.

I'm happy to reopen this if someone can reproduce the issue. It's definitely a bug if timezones are getting dropped.

[kohane27]

I'm very confused about the following behavior:

text = """
---
wake_up: 06:20
sleep: 10:00
---
Content
"""

post = frontmatter.loads(text)
print(frontmatter.dumps(post))

Result:

---
sleep: 600
wake_up: 06:20
---

Content

sleep is changed completely (but not wake_up). The sleep value is changed from 10:00 to 600.

Config: OS: Linux Python: 3.10.4 python-frontmatter: 1.0.0

Any idea is much appreciated. Thanks!

[kohane27]

I tried the js's parser Markdown YAML metadata parser and got the same result. I think I got the YAML format wrong. I quoted the value "10:00" and got the same result back. Thanks!