Libove Blog

Personal Blog about anything - mostly programming, cooking and random thoughts

Weekly 2022-41

Published:
  • Read The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
    • My take aways:
      • Start to measure success metrics from day 1
      • Avoid measurements which increase naturally (i.e. number of registered users).
      • Ensure you can do split tests from the start
      • Build "sloppy" feature and check if they improve your success metrics. If they don't, question why and throw that feature away
  • Finished the Jean le Flambeur Series by Hannu Rajaniemi. 5/5
    • The books play in a future version of the solar system where virtually everything is turned into smart matter and the boundaries between "reality" and the virtual world are blurred to the point where they almost no longer matter. The series tells the story of "Jean le Flambeur" and "Mieli", who travel the solar system to fulfil their duties to a Goddess. The journey takes them to Mars, Earth and Saturn.

Go: Custom Date/Time Format in YAML

Published:

The yaml package in Go uses a default time format for marshalling and will only accept this format when reading a yaml file. This is ok if you use the serializer to exchange data between programs, but quickly falls apart when user generated files have to be parsed. As I'm using yaml headers in Markdown files (and yaml files in various other places) to generate this blog, I needa more robust and user friendly way to set publishing dates. Ideally the blog software should accept any time format.

For this guide I will assume that we have a yaml format like this:

title: "How to parse YAML dates"
date: 17-10-2022

The corresponding definition in Go looks like this:

type Data struct {
	Title   string    `yaml:"title"`
	Date    time.Time `yaml:"date"`
}

When we try to unmarshal the above yaml it will result in an error: parsing time "17-10-2022" as "2006-01-02T15:04:05Z07:00": cannot parse "0-2022" as "2006". To support this format the unmarshal behavior of the Data struct has to be overwritten.

func (d *Data) UnmarshalYAML(unmarshal func(interface{}) error) error {
	type T struct {
		Title string `yaml:"title"`
	}
	type S struct {
		Date string `yaml:"date"`
	}

	// parse non-time fields
	var t T
	if err := unmarshal(&t); err != nil {
		return err
	}
	d.Title = t.Title

	// parse time field
	var s S

	if err := unmarshal(&s); err != nil {
		return err
	}

	possibleFormats := []string{
		"02-01-2006",
		time.Layout,
		time.ANSIC,
	}
	var found_time bool = false
	for _, format := range possibleFormats {
		if t, err := time.Parse(format, s.Date); err == nil {
			d.Date = t
			found_time = true
			break
		}
	}

	if !found_time {
		return fmt.Errorf("could not parse date: %s", s.Date)
	}

	return nil
}

Let's break this down.

func (d *Data) UnmarshalYAML(unmarshal func(interface{}) error) error {

In order to control the unmarhalling of a yaml file, we have to provide an UnmarshalYAML function for the struct. This function is passed an unmarshal function which can be used to parse arbitrary structs. We will use this function multiple times to retrieve different parts of the yaml file.

	type T struct {
		Title string `yaml:"title"`
	}
	type S struct {
		Date string `yaml:"date"`
	}

Next we separate our Data struct into two parts; one for everything we just want to keep as it is and one for the date field. Note that the date field is using string as its type, as we want to do the time parsing ourselves.

	// parse non-time fields
	var t T
	if err := unmarshal(&t); err != nil {
		return err
	}
	d.Title = t.Title

For all fields that we want to keep untouched, we just have to call the unmarshal function and, if no error occured, copy the data to our data struct. To parse the date we start similarily, by getting the time string.

	// parse time field
	var s S

	if err := unmarshal(&s); err != nil {
		return err
	}

Aftwards the function loops over all formats that we want to support and check if the string matches any format. The list of possible formats can be extended. I kept it short in this example. You can find the full list I use at the bottom of the tutorial.

	possibleFormats := []string{
		"02-01-2006",
		time.Layout,
		time.ANSIC,
	}
	var found_time bool = false
	for _, format := range possibleFormats {
		if t, err := time.Parse(format, s.Date); err == nil {
			d.Date = t
			found_time = true
			break
		}
	}

Finally, we check if any format matched.

	if !found_time {
		return fmt.Errorf("could not parse date: %s", s.Date)
	}

	return nil

Now our Data struct will accept any time format we add to the possibleFormats list. This is the full list I currently use in my blog software, the latest code can be found in the owl-blogs project.

	possibleFormats := []string{
		"2006-01-02",
		time.Layout,
		time.ANSIC,
		time.UnixDate,
		time.RubyDate,
		time.RFC822,
		time.RFC822Z,
		time.RFC850,
		time.RFC1123,
		time.RFC1123Z,
		time.RFC3339,
		time.RFC3339Nano,
		time.Stamp,
		time.StampMilli,
		time.StampMicro,
		time.StampNano,
	}

New Markup

Published:

I've worked on my microformat markup and added more author information to the h-entry. Additionally I've added support for replys to my Markdown files, by defining the reply-to in the meta data like such:

reply:
  url: "https://borghal.blog/note/2022/09/11/194932/"

Hope this works for your webmention implementation :)

Re:

Published:
Reply to:

Leveling up my IndieWeb game

My markup is still a bit rough and minimal. I guess you could use the name in my h-card, but I definitely should add the author to the h-entry.

Re:

Published:
Reply to:

Leveling up my IndieWeb game

I'm currently in the same process. I've just retrieved and sent my first webmentions two weeks ago. I really like the way you integrated the mentions into you blog, my implementation is still very basic in that regard.

Micropub is also high on my list, after attending the Homebrew Website Club this week, as I'm still missing a convenient and fast method to create new post. Especially shorter once, like replies to post.