Fallback Mechanism for Articles with Default Timestamps in RSS Feeds, e. g. 1970-01-01T00:00:00.000Z for Google Alerts

[atraining]

Hello,

Firstly, I'd like to take a moment to express my gratitude for your work on Osmosfeed. The project is incredibly helpful and well-structured. It's truly been a pleasure to use it.

I'm writing to bring to your attention an issue I've come across while using the Osmosfeed with certain RSS feeds. Specifically, I've noticed that some feeds return a fallback timestamp, "1970-01-01T00:00:00.000Z", when the publication date isn't available. This is happening, for example, with some articles from Google Alert feeds.

While this isn't strictly a problem with Osmosfeed, it would be extremely useful to have a built-in fallback mechanism that could handle these cases. For instance, if the returned timestamp is the Unix Epoch (1970-01-01T00:00:00.000Z), new Date(null), the current date and time could be used instead.

I've attempted to create such a function:

function getTimestamps(isoUtcTimestamp: string, timezoneOffset: number) {
  let correctedIsoUtcTimestamp = isoUtcTimestamp;
  if (isoUtcTimestamp === "1970-01-01T00:00:00.000Z") {
    correctedIsoUtcTimestamp = new Date().toISOString();
  }
  const isoOffsetTime = getIsoTimeWithOffset(correctedIsoUtcTimestamp, timezoneOffset);
  return {
    isoUtcPublishTime: correctedIsoUtcTimestamp,
    isoOffsetPublishDate: getDateFromIsoString(isoOffsetTime),
  };
}

However, I thought it would be better if such a mechanism was integrated into the project, given that other users might encounter the same issue.

Thank you once again for your wonderful work on this project. Your effort is truly appreciated.