date.8601 XMLRPC::Lite perl MetaWeblog
Good christ this stuff is a headache. Perl has this wonderful module that allows you to build simple xmlrpc clients and servers very easily.
It looks at the structure of your request and figures out by the data type how to map it in to xml by playing data type guessing games.
Unless you pass it a date, which it treats as a string.
Now, xmlrpc has an explicit date type. So if you’re using XMLRPC::Lite to call an api method (for instance metaweblog.newPost) and pass it a date in the request structure (say, in the ‘dateCreated’ or ‘date_created_gmt’ fields), what the server gets isn’t the date field, it’s a string field, even though the contents are the same.
How to force it to call the thing a date I have no idea.
Currently I’m looking at rewriting the damn client in python.
But my eyes keep sliding over to my old (but pretty damn robust) c++ xmlrpc libraries. I could use that to generate a request and, if I was feeling lazy, just pipe the thing into curl or wget.