Invalid strings in Dateutil 2.2 now cause TypeError instead of ValueError

[James Crasta]

Traceback in dateutil 2.1 looks like this:

>>> import dateutil
>>> dateutil.__version__
'2.1'
>>> from dateutil import parser
>>> parser.parse('2013-01-01')
datetime.datetime(2013, 1, 1, 0, 0)
>>> parser.parse('yesterday')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/Users/james/scripts/test_env/lib/python2.7/site-packages/dateutil/parser.py", line 720, in parse
    return DEFAULTPARSER.parse(timestr, **kwargs)
  File "/Users/james/scripts/test_env/lib/python2.7/site-packages/dateutil/parser.py", line 310, in parse
    raise ValueError("unknown string format")
ValueError: unknown string format

And in dateutil 2.2 looks like this:
>>> import dateutil
>>> dateutil.__version__
'2.2'
>>> from dateutil import parser
>>> parser.parse('yesterday')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/Users/james/scripts/python_env/lib/python2.7/site-packages/dateutil/parser.py", line 748, in parse
    return DEFAULTPARSER.parse(timestr, **kwargs)
  File "/Users/james/scripts/python_env/lib/python2.7/site-packages/dateutil/parser.py", line 310, in parse
    res, skipped_tokens = self._parse(timestr, **kwargs)
TypeError: 'NoneType' object is not iterable

It works for a number of unknown strings, like 'fooflaf', 'hello my name is bob' or anything else seemingly that starts without a number.

[DragonDave (2-dragon)]

Here's a patch which works for me and passes all the tests.
Essentially, the issue is that _parse returns None in a number of instances, but the interface has changed and a 2-tuple is now expected. It's essentially saying:

a, b = None

which fails miserably. Instead we return (None, None).

[Jon Dufresne (jdufresne)]

Recently ran into this issue. The end result is I can't reliably pass user data to dateutil.parser.parse(), as it may contain an invalid string, but I can't catch the correct exception to handle it.

Any chance of the fix being accepted and rolled into a new version?

[jarondl (jarondl)]

fixed on GH: https://github.com/dateutil/dateutil/commit/08679489e84595298b98257039e1afdbdbd0ab46
the GH branch will soon become the official one

[jarondl (jarondl)]

Fixed on 2.3