Parsing the date
When you're using a manual RSS builder, you have an option to specify a field to fetch news date. To include the date in to the feed, FetchRSS needs to convert it to fit RSS specification first.
Our service is designed to recognize common date formats automatically and can convert it to the required form. But sometimes the automatic converting fails, and you may need to specify a date parsing rule by yourself.
For cases like that, you can use special parsing characters. For instance, if you want the following string "15/01/2018" to be handled as a date in "day/month/year" format you should specify a pattern "d/m/Y". And it will be correctly recognized and turned to the required format.
The following characters are recognized in the parsing string:
| Format character | Description | Example parsable values |
|---|---|---|
| Day | ||
| d and j | Day of the month, 2 digits with or without leading zeros | 01 to 31 or 1 to 31 |
| D and l | A textual representation of a day | Mon through Sun or Sunday through Saturday |
| S | English ordinal suffix for the day of the month, 2 characters. It's ignored while processing. | st, nd, rd or th. |
| z | The day of the year (starting from 0) | 0 through 365 |
| Month | ||
| F and M | A textual representation of a month, such as January or Sept | January through December or Jan through Dec |
| m and n | Numeric representation of a month, with or without leading zeros | 01 through 12 or 1 through 12 |
| Year | ||
| Y | A full numeric representation of a year, 4 digits | Examples: 1999 or 2003 |
| y | A two digit representation of a year (which is assumed to be in the range 1970-2069, inclusive) | Examples: 99 or 03 (which will be interpreted as 1999 and 2003, respectively) |
| Time | ||
| a and A | Ante meridiem and Post meridiem | am or pm |
| g and h | 12-hour format of an hour with or without leading zero | 1 through 12 or 01 through 12 |
| G and H | 24-hour format of an hour with or without leading zeros | 0 through 23 or 00 through 23 |
| i | Minutes with leading zeros | 00 to 59 |
| s | Seconds, with leading zeros | 00 through 59 |
| u | Microseconds (up to six digits) | Example: 45, 654321 |
| Timezone | ||
| e, O, P and T | Timezone identifier, or difference to UTC in hours, or difference to UTC with colon between hours and minutes, or timezone abbreviation | Examples: UTC, GMT, Atlantic/Azores or +0200 or +02:00 or EST, MDT |
| Full Date/Time | ||
| U | Seconds since the Unix Epoch (January 1 1970 00:00:00 GMT) | Example: 1292177455 |
| Whitespace and Separators | ||
| (space) | One space or one tab | Example: |
| # | One of the following separation symbol: ;, :, /, ., ,, -, ( or ) | Example: / |
| ;, :, /, ., ,, -, ( or ) | The specified character. | Example: - |
| ? | A random byte | Example: ^ (Be aware that for UTF-8 characters you might need more than one ?. In this case, using * is probably what you want instead) |
| * | Random bytes until the next separator or digit | Example: * in Y-*-d with the string 2009-aWord-08 will match aWord |