Converting a string to the most probable type

[Lie]

On Mar 8, 12:19 am, rockingred <willsteve2... at yahoo.ca> wrote:
> Dates can be a pain.  I wrote my own date program, simply because
> there are so many different ways to write a date:
>
> Mar 8, 2008
> March 8th, 08
> 03/08/08
> 03-08-2008
>
> And so on and so forth.  The tricky bit is how to tell the difference
> between Day, Month and Year.
>
> I wrote a program to check the format used for a date.  I assumed that
> any 4 digits together in a single group were the year.  Then I had a
> list of Months, with the first 3 characters of each and compared that
> to the field being checked, if found, then that was the month.  Then I
> assumed any number greater than 12 was a day.  If I couldn't match
> those criteria I assumed Month Day Year (the standard at the company I
> worked for).

If humans are sometimes confused about this, how could a computer
reliably tells the correct date? I don't think it's possible (to
_reliably_ convert string to date), unless you've got an agreed
convention on how to input the date.