Date type handling?

[joe-bruce]

This lib looks like a really nice approach. I don't see support for Date types, though. Do you have a plan to support them?

[colinhacks]

Implemented in zod@1.2.3 👍

Take it for a spin and let me know if you have any issues.

[joe-bruce]

Thanks! I see Date validation, but was hoping for Date parsing. (Something like https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Date/parse)
Am I barking up the wrong tree?

[colinhacks]

Hey Joe,

So you want to be able to pass in, say, an ISO string to a Date field and have .parse return a proper Date object in its place?

const Person = z.object({
  createdAt: z.date()
})

const person = Person.parse({
  createdAt: `2020-04-09T22:11:52.520Z`
}) // passes

person.createdAt // Date object

I'm trying to keep this library from becoming a casting library, since casting is generally messy and difficult, especially when you're dealing with static types. Currently the above code wouldn't pass static validation, sincezod expects Person.createdAt to be a Date. To get it to work, I'd have to create a variant of the inferred schema type that changes all Date fields to Date | string, to accommodate the loosened restrictions on the input to .parse. Over time these "loosenings" would get messier and less intuitive.

I'd rather implement this is a refinement string type:

const Person = z.object({
  createdAt: z.string().refine({ is: 'isoString' });
})

I'm already planning to implement other built-in refinement validators ({ is: 'email' }, { is: 'url' }, etc.).

This way you could parse your schema, then be confident that passing Person.createdAt into Date.parse will return a valid date. Would that work for you?

[colinhacks]

@joe-bruce Closing this for now. If you really prefer a lib that does type coercion check out myzod.

[TroyMorvant]

Did you ever implement the refinement validation?

[colinhacks]

You can do custom refinements now but there isn't a built-in way to check for valid ISO date strings because that can mean many different things. I recommend creating a custom refinement using a regex that does exactly what you want.

Zod will also support transformations soon (#100) so the original use case will also be possible.

[maneetgoyal]

Was about to request date/time/date-time formats and then stumbled upon this issue. Would it make sense to use the regex that AJV is also using? I am thinking of using refinement with these regexes thinking they would be very robust. But looking at the Stackoverflow answer shared above, @vriad do you mean that the regex to correctly handle all those cases is just isn't available yet?

[colinhacks]

Feel free to open this as a separate issue. I'm open to implementing AJV's date/time/date-time regexes as built-ins.

[maneetgoyal]

Great :)