Pete Freitag Pete Freitag

Parsing Atom Dates (ISO8601) in ColdFusion

Published on February 24, 2005
By Pete Freitag
coldfusion

Need to parse the dates in an Atom feed? Atom feeds use ISO 8601 formatted dates, something like this; 1994-11-05T08:15:30-05:00 with a UTC offset, or like this: 1994-11-05T13:15:30Z in GMT. You can come across both formats in an Atom feed, the atom:modified element MUST have a timezone specified, while the atom:issued element MAY specify a timezone.

Before getting too far, I checked CFLib's date library, and sure enough I found a function called DateConvertISO8601 by David Satz. From my limited testing the function seams to work well for parsing Atom / ISO8601 dates.



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Parsing Atom Dates (ISO8601) in ColdFusion was first published on February 24, 2005.

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Comments

After looking at the code I realize that this method does not handle all formats (if you don't specify seconds, it will fail, or if you specify fraction of a second it will fail).

I may end up writing my own
by Pete Freitag on 02/24/2005 at 12:58:45 PM UTC
Hi Peter. Do you know of any custom CF tags that parse atom feeds? I have found a few for RSS 2.0 but have yet to find an atom parser. Thank you!
by Jeff Lemmon on 04/04/2006 at 7:23:14 PM UTC
The link to the DateConvertISO8601 UDF is broken (because URL rewrites were set up when the website became "static".) The new URL is https://cflib.org/udf/DateConvertISO8601
by James Moberg on 12/27/2017 at 3:34:19 PM UTC