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Comment by hkolk | Hacker News Reader

I would expect to use the first day of a month as a default, just like when time is not specified it should use 00:00 as default. Taking the current time/day as a default sounds off.

Probably hard to fix backwards compatible though...

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Agreed; I expect date parsers to give me earliest-available value for a field if it's not specified, with the exception being the current year rather than 0 AD or whatever.

Javascript:

    new Date("Feb 2006")
    > Wed Feb 01 2006 00:00:00 GMT-0800 (Pacific Standard Time)

Ruby:

    require 'time'
    Time.parse "Feb 2006"
    => 2006-02-01 00:00:00 -0700

According to the documentation there's a 'default' parameter, which contains the datetime used to get otherwise unspecified fields. If not given, the default is the current date. Thus to get what you want:

    >>> from datetime import datetime
    >>> from dateutil import parser
    >>> now = datetime.now()
    >>> first = datetime(now.year, now.month, 1, 12, 0, 0)
    >>> dateutil.parser.parse('February 2006', default=first)
    datetime.datetime(2006, 2, 1, 12, 0)

Exactly, not sure how much code has been written to take advantage of this fact. Taking day 1 is a much safer option definitely.

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