Comment 2 for bug 1418772

I've pushed this to master, rel_2_6, and rel_2_7. Note that because of the prior push of the patches for bug 1366026 to master and merge conflicts with rel_2_6, each branch has a slightly different variation. I also added a follow-up so that unitialized variable warnings wouldn't be logged if an undef date was passed to parse_datetime.

Thanks, Steven and Jeff!