How to create proper RSS pubDate with Yahoo Pipes?

Question

I would like to convert dates in the format like 24 february 2014 to proper RSS pubDate format (actually february on my pages is written in Russian). I have the following code to create own RSS -

XPath Fetch Page

URL: http://www.tcsbank.ru/about/news-archive/
Extract Using XPath: //li[@class='news-list__item']
Use HTML5 parser: yes

Loop

For each *item* in input field
  ...
  PubDate: item.span
emit *all* results

Loop

For each *item.pubDate*
  Replace
  first * january * with *.01.*
  first * february * with *.02.* 
  ...
assign results to *item.pubDate*

In result, my pubDate contains value in the format DD.MM.YYYY (and works only for first 10 months since Replace supports 10 replacements only). Which is still invalid date.

How should I fix that?

Answer 1

You could add one more loop just like the last one, to finish up the remaining months:

For each *item.pubDate*
  Replace
  first * november * with *.11.*
  first * december * with *.12.* 
  ...
assign results to *item.pubDate*

But an even easier solution is to use Regex instead of Loop for this:

in item.pubDate replace january with 01
in item.pubDate replace february with 02
...

and again, create a second Regex for the last two months. (same max 10 entries limitation)

Finally, to convert these now numeric dates to a different date format, you can use a Regex replacement like this:

in item.pubDate replace (\d\d)\.(\d\d)\.(\d{4}) with $3-$2-$1

This will convert DD.MM.YYYY format to YYYY-MM-DD format. If you need slightly different format, adjust the expression appropriately.

UPDATE

I cloned your original pipe and did what I could:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=cda36fe2b6f05160860c30bf1f0ece06

... unfortunately, it still doesn't work: the RSS view still doesn't include pubDate, even though I converted it to a proper DateTime object. It's also strange that the pipe's page shows warnings at first, that something is not a proper DateTime object, but then the view changes and it shows the feed entries correctly. I don't understand what is not a proper DateTime object there.

Yahoo Pipes is buggy. Many things that should work don't work, but sometimes there's a workaround. Maybe you'll find one for this if you play with it long enough. But maybe not. Good luck in any case.