New version of PodcastUtilities
This month I have done a maintenance release of PodcastUtilities. I was seeing this error from a number of sites, including the BBC, The Guardian and NZ Tech Podcast.
GetFeedEpisodes: warning, unable to add an episode for Tech Weekly, Thu, 03 Dec 2015 15:35:14 UTC is not a valid RFC 822 string representation of a date and time.
I was surprised by the error as it looked OK to me. I ended up adding another unit test with this string in it and when I debugged it I was surprised to discover that the error is correct, the date is not valid. According to RFC 822 the only legal suffixes for universal time are GMT, UT or Z (see page 26), UTC is not valid. I didn't really know what to do in the end I decided to be pragmatic and permit the invalid date format as it was obvious that it was supposed to be UT. It is a bit alarming that big internet providers don't appear to be able to support the simplest standards, and somewhat alarmingly some weeks they were find and on others it was invalid.
The new version (2.1.0.7) is now in BitBucket and also available as a binary download if you just want to run PodcastUtilities.