Date and Number formatting

[keertip]

Editor Feedback:

Please add date and number string formatting. This feature is a real world requirements.

[bwilkerson]

Removed Area-Editor label.
Added Area-Library label.

[DartBot]

This comment was originally written by @butlermatt

---

I'm particularly interested in Date formatting convenience function(s). Even an optional argument of Date.toString to accept formatted string arguments (ie: %Y-%m %h:%m) and other such notations. That or alternatively add a .fmtString(String format) method instead of an optional argument to toString.

This is surprising it doesn't support it, as a new Date instance can be created from a formatted string, but not able to generate a formatted string itself.

[floitschG]

I think I changed the Date class to only accept (a subset) of Iso 8601, which is consistent with its output (which, again, is very close to Iso 8601). From my point-of-view the only requirement for the Date.fromString should be to accept the output of Date.toString. Date-strings are just extremely locale dependent and getting Date parsing right would be difficult. I would not be surprised if the same string should be interpreted differently depending on where you are. For instance some countries prefer months first, whereas other the days, etc.

The current idea is to leave more complex date-formatting (and parsing) to an i18n library

[floitschG]

Small correction: Date.fromString should also be able to parse Iso 8601 (in addition to Date.toString).

[floitschG]

Date.fromString is tracked in issue #1878.

[sethladd]

Date formating (date to string) is tracked in issue #1706.

[sethladd]

Thank you for the report. I am closing this specific issue as it covers two broad issues, with at least one having an open issue.

Note: this does not mean we are not doing this, just that we need two specific issues to track.

---

Added WontFix label.