This is helpful.

Given where we are, let's just put this in as doc of what strict and lax mean.

I'm in favor of adding the variations of EEEE... and eeee... which are supported by ICU. This is upward compatible, and will avoid need for a special check to exclude them.

The broken EEEEE form is just a bug - I'd say this is just a release note item for products providing DFDL, unless ICU fixes it 'real soon now'.


On Wed, Aug 14, 2013 at 8:58 AM, Steve Hanson <smh@uk.ibm.com> wrote:
For the subset of ICU symbols that DFDL supports, here is what ICU claim:

1) Lenient parsing behaviour when in 'strict' mode:
a) case insensitive matching for text fields
b) MMM, MMMM, MMMMM all accept either short or long form of Month
c) E, EE, EEE, EEEE, EEEEE **, EEEEEE *** all accept either abbreviated, full, narrow and short forms of Day of Week
d) accept truncated leftmost numeric field (eg, pattern "HHmmss" allows "123456" (12:34:56) and "23456" (2:34:56) but not "3456")

2) Additional lenient parsing behaviour when in 'lax' mode:
a) values outside valid ranges are normalized (eg, "March 32 1996" is treated as "April 1 1996")
b) ignoring a trailing dot after a non-numeric field
c) leading and trailing whitespace in the data but not in the pattern is accepted ****
d) whitespace in the pattern can be missing in the data
e) partial matching on literal strings (eg, data "20130621d" allowed for pattern "yyyyMMdd'date' " ****

** Bug found when testing this - EEEEE 'narrow' form completely broken - ICU ticket raised.

*** EEEEEE and eeeeee are new and support a 2 char version of 'short' form - eg Tu or Mo. Not currently allowed by DFDL, we should consider allowing it.

**** Only currently in ICU4C. ICU4J will be changed to match ICU4C.

Note: IBM is in discussion with ICU to provide a 'really strict' mode (name tbd) which has no leniency at all. We need to decide whether to reflect all three variants in the dfdl:calendarCheckPolicy, or whether to remap our 'strict' to the new 'really strict' mode when it appears. Given where we are I think is a DFDL 2.0 item.

Regards

Steve Hanson
Architect, IBM Data Format Description Language (DFDL)
Co-Chair, OGF DFDL Working Group
IBM SWG, Hursley, UK
smh@uk.ibm.com
tel:+44-1962-815848
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