[uf-discuss] Apple Data Detectors

[Michael MD]

> people write dates, addresses, etc on the Web or on their emails. Asking 
> people to write "Tuesday, February 5, 2008" in this order, with the 
> commas, etc. is very likely even simpler for normal people than writing


you would *think* so - and it would certainly be nice .... but the behaviour 
or most people out in the real world does not suggest that this would be 
easy.

Most freeform text dates I see out there are missing the year (how is a 
machine supposed to work out what year was intended?)...
and a lot of them are in useless ambiguous formats like dd/mm/yyyy or 
mm/dd/yy - ) ... then there all those other variations... to many to list!

I've experimented a bit with trying to parse freeform text dates ... the 
problem is as soon as its loose enough to pick up most of the common ways 
people write dates it then also starts to pick up a lot of other stuff as 
dates that were not intended to be dates at all!