The real life situation with date strings is much worse. I live in a city (Zoetermeer) where a passport was issued with the holders birthdate being 00-00-1972. I'm very much in favor of not trying to be clever in the core Date classes, and to provide separate guessing logic, properly internationalized. The current readFrom: is not usefull at all, except in the US. And even there it simply breaks on real-life data. Stephan