Comment by vander_elst

> parsing of strings that do not remotely resemble actual dates.

But this is somehow my point, what were the reasons that lead to parse those strings as dates. I guess the answer is usually legacy, but in that "legacy" why did someone need to take those decisions? My naive way of parsing dates would be to reject everything that doesn't have a well defined format while the format is well defined and at least somehow composable, but here someone had the need (I hope the had the need) to parse these seemingly random strings, I wonder why.