RSSHub

Date Handling

When crawling a web page, the web page usually provides a date. This tutorial will illustrate how a script should properly handle that situation

# No Date

Do not add a date when a website does not provide one. The pubDate option should be left empty.

# Standard

pubDate must be a

  1. Date Object (opens new window)
  2. Not recommended, only use for compatible strings that can be parsed correctly because its behavior may be inconsistent across environments, Date.parse() (opens new window). Please avoid using it

Also, the pubDate passed in from the script should correspond to the time zone/time used by the server. For more details, see the following:

# Use utilities class

We recommend using Day.js (opens new window) for date processing and time zone adjustment as of now. There are two related tool classes:

# Parse Date

This is a utility class for using Day.js (opens new window). In most cases, it is possible to use it directly to get the correct Date Object

Please refer to Day.js GitHub description for specific parsing parameters

const { parseDate } = require('@/utils/parse-date');

const pubDate = parseDate('2020/12/30', 'YYYY/MM/DD');

If you need to parse a relative date, use parseRelativeDate.

const { parseRelativeDate } = require('@/utils/parse-date');

const pubDate = parseRelativeDate('2 days ago');
const pubDate = parseRelativeDate('day before yesterday 15:36');

# Timezone

Some websites will not convert the time zone according to the location of a visitor. The time obtained will be the local time of the website, which may not be suitable for all RSS subscribers. In this case, you should specify the time zone manually:

Warning

Now, the time will be converted to server time, which facilitates middleware processing.

const timezone = require('@/utils/timezone');

const pubDate = timezone(new Date(), +8);