Date Validation and ?= does not work for Victoria 3

[kaiser-chris]

Hi,

it seems like the dates of Victoria 3 can not be validated by the plugin.
Also the ?= operator can not be used, this seems to be the same for CK3 #52.
?= and = can and are used interchangably in Victoria 3 files.

CWT for the date issue:

alias[effect:create_character] = {
    ...
    birth_date = date_field
    ...
}

Unmodified base game file with both issues:
bad - baden.txt

?= Error:

After changing ?= to = the date error is still there:

Regards,

Chris

[DragonKnightOfBreeze]

What is ?= meaning?

[kaiser-chris]

?= is the same as = as far as I can tell.
I can use either and the game will successfully parse the file.

[DragonKnightOfBreeze]

wtf

[kaiser-chris]

Yep!
Official files sometimes use = and sometimes ?= in the same file for the same commands.
It is really strange.

[DragonKnightOfBreeze]

could ?= be used in other situations?

[kaiser-chris]

I have searched the whole game files and found 5780 uses of ?=.

It seems like newer changes/content uses it more frequently.
Maybe Paradox switched it mid development or for later patches.

Below are some examples:

[DragonKnightOfBreeze]

Strange

[kaiser-chris]

Also tested it with the VSCode Plugin of @tboby for a sanity check and it works but has strange highlighting:

vs

Edit: Added second image

[DragonKnightOfBreeze]

What are the valid date formats of date fields?

[kaiser-chris]

I did some broad searches in the Victoria 3 game files and the only format I have found is this:
birth_date = 1887.10.23
game_date < 1845.1.1
earliest_usage_date = 1841.1.1

Format: <year>.<month>.<day>

If you want I could test other formats that work on other games like CK2/3 or VIC2 but VIC3 just uses the format above.

I also looked into the CWT documentation and found this in it:
https://github.com/cwtools/cwtools/wiki/.cwt-config-file-guidance#simple-rules

EDIT: Added link to the CWT documentation.

[DragonKnightOfBreeze]

OK according to all of these, the date format to validate in JVM should be yyyy.M.d