[FEATURE] - Any plan to support Year field in the cron expression

[Tochemey]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe

The standard cron expression does accept year field. This for instance helps to schedule tasks to run only once.

From the code I cannot see anything that will help handle that. That means a cron expression like this 0 0 0 4 JUL ? 2014 will fail the parser because I have seen that there is validation done on the cron expression.

reference: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E12058_01/doc/doc.1014/e12030/cron_expressions.htm

[Tochemey]

@JohnRoesler This is an example:

var cronExpressionParser = cron.NewParser(
    cron.SecondOptional | cron.Minute | cron.Hour | cron.Dom | cron.Month | cron.Dow | cron.Descriptor,
)

cronExpression := "0 0 0 4 JUL ? 2014"
spec, err := cronExpressionParser.Parse(cronExpression)

and this the outcome:

expected 5 to 6 fields, found 7: [0 0 0 4 JUL ? 2014]

However this 0 0 0 4 JUL ? 2014 is valid cron expression

[JohnRoesler]

Hey @Tochemey,

Couple things:

• I use https://github.com/robfig/cron for crontab support and that lib doesn't support year

  Although, note that the year field (optional in Quartz) is not supported.

• I don't agree with the assertion that "The standard cron expression does accept year field. " - that one particular spec you linked does include year, but it doesn't seem to be universal or standard.
  • https://crontab.guru/ notes as non-standard
  • https://www.adminschoice.com/crontab-quick-reference, https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/db2oc?topic=task-unix-cron-format don't mention year (just a few examples

What are you trying to accomplish? I imagine there are other ways to achieve it without the year field?

To answer the title question: no, no plans. Cheers!

[Tochemey]

@JohnRoesler Thanks for the reply.

[Tochemey]

@JohnRoesler even on Wikipedia the Cron expression does accept year field. It just not required. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cron&action=edit&section=9