Parsing pubDate in XML

Archived
1

I’m looking for suggestions on parsing the pubDate in an XML feed. The feed gives me a pubDate of:

<pubDate>Wed, 9 Nov 2011 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>

I have no control over the time, so I’d prefer to strip off the “00:00:00 GMT” in the following parsing code:

' release date
			if item.GetNamedElements("blip:datestamp").Count() > 0
				dt = CreateObject("roDateTime")
				dt.FromISO8601String(ValidStr(item.GetNamedElements("blip:datestamp")[0].GetText()))
				newItem.releaseDate = dt.AsDateStringNoParam()
			else
				newItem.releaseDate = ValidStr(item.pubdate.GetText())
			end if
			newItem.shortDescriptionLine2 = newItem.releaseDate
			
			' media:content can be a child of <item> or of <media:group>
			contentItems = item.GetNamedElements("media:content")
			if contentItems.Count() = 0
				tmp = item.GetNamedElements("media:group")
				if tmp.Count() > 0
					contentItems = tmp.GetNamedElements("media:content")
				end if
			end if

Thanks again for any guidance!
~Mark

2

If your date string always ends in the following 13 characters: " 00:00:00 GMT", then this should work:

newDate = Left (dateString, Len (dateString) - 13)

Although, if it may also be of the form " 0:00:00 GMT" then you might want to use:


if Mid (dateString, Len (dateString) - 11, 1) = " " then
      newDate = Left (dateString, Len (dateString) - 12)
else
      newDate = Left (dateString, Len (dateString) - 13)
endif

I haven’t tested it out since I don’t have my Roku with me, but that should give you somewhere to start. I believe you could also parse your date using an roRegex object (see the Component Reference Manual, section 5.5).

3

Thanks belltown. Your first suggestion worked. I’ll experiment with your other ideas too.