I may be being stupid but the current Date Class does not appear to protect itself against a ByteString that is not in valid date format, e.g. by raising an Error.

e.g. the code ��ABC�� asDate opens the Debugger on #isLetter was sent to nil because it appears to expect more letters after $C but the peek returns nil instead.

This seems to me to require a more defensive programming approach.

I would like to validate a user input as a valid date in a number of different formats before converting it to a Date and storing it in my model.

I��ve tried using the Date parser, e.g.

Date readFrom: '04/02/2013' readStream pattern: 'dd/mm/yyyy'.

This is fine for simply parsing a valid string but rates a DateError if it doesn��t match the .�� So entering ��04/13/2013�� cleverly raises ��DateError: There is no 13^th month��.

My thought was I could use this to return a simple true/false result in a ByteString extension in my application for example as follows:

ByteString >> isValdiDate

(Date readFrom: self pattern: ��dd/mm/yyyy��) on: DateError do: [^ false].

^ true

However this doesn��t intercept the DateError which is simply reported in the Debugger as before.�� This may be my lack of uncderstaning of the Exception handling in Pharo.

Any and all thoughts welcome.