[Ivorforce]

Modeled after wfdb_strptime (directly above).

I'm not sure if this is violating the spec, but it should be fairly unambiguous with this date format (moreso than the d/m/y format, which might be interpreted as m/d/y).

[Ivorforce]

Just noticing that this change wouldn't work just yet because of the regex above. I'll wait for feedback before fixing that though.

[tompollard]

Thanks for this! The WFDB header format only allows the base date as DD/MM/YYYY, and the WFDB library ignores a date in any other form (rdsamp -pd shows no date for a header with 25.04.1989), so accepting DD.MM.YYYY here would make the two read the same file differently. Closing for that reason.

Perhaps we should consider supporting ISO 8601 dates (YYYY-MM-DD) in future. That would need changes to the WFDB library and the format specification too, though, so it's not something we'd add here on its own. Please feel free to open an issue if you'd like to discuss this further.

[tompollard]

For anyone following this: there is now a draft proposal for a JSON header syntax, which uses ISO 8601 dates (YYYY-MM-DD), in wfdb/wfdb-spec#25. Comments are welcome there.