Behaviour with date filters with "invalid" queries

[claremacrae]

Background

In my early days of using the Tasks plugin, I often wrote filters like this:

due by today

I didn't get an error, but I found that I only got dates due on today.

Eventually I learned that I had to write it like this to get the correct results, and was mildly irritated that I didn't receive an error message.

due before today

Today I learned...

In writing tests for the new happens feature, I now understand why. I had tried to write some failing tests where there was gobbledegook instead of before, on or after.

What I believe is happening is that the date-parsing checks if the 2nd word is one of before, on or after.

If not, the entire remaining text is passed through to the date-parsing.

And the date-parsing is very forgiving, so a date of by today is treated as today - and the by is just ignored, rather than being an error.

Question

Does this matter?

Does this matter enough to do anything about it?

[schemar]

Thank you for bringing this up, @claremacrae.

I think it does matter, but I don't know how to solve it. In which cases exactly would we show an error? Specifically if someone uses the word by? We cannot know if chronos parsed a sensible string or not, I think.

For this specific case: we could add by as a word that Tasks understands and treats equally to before. What do you think?

[claremacrae]

We cannot know if chronos parsed a sensible string or not, I think

I am not confident of this, but I thought I saw somewhere that chrono.parseDate() provided access to info about unrecognised text.

If so, then I've been thinking that if the date parsing in Tasks could provide access to any such unrecognised text, then we could consider treating such unrecognised text in the date as an error...

It would be worth exploring anyway.

[schemar]

It could be possible to compare the results' text property to the input text and see if it differs. However, I am not confident that a mismatch necessarily must mean an error. But could be.

[claremacrae]

Yes, I'm not sure either. I just wanted to jot down the idea for now...