Custom date token too fussy

Hi Folks,

Since I upgraded to v4 I have been experiencing this problem. I have a bunch of rules that use custom date tokens that used to work just fine. They do stuff like looking for a contents match in a PDF document for a date in the form 12 Jan 2014. None of them have worked for some time now and I finally found time to check out why.

If I make a PDF containing the date 12 Jan 2014 the rule will not match.
If I make a PDF containing the date 12 Jan. 2014 the rule will match.

Now, none of the statements I receive from my utilities, bank etc. contain a period ('.') in the shortened form of the month name. Is there a way to have Hazel go back to the old standard where it was happy to accept the shortened form of the month name either with or without the period? Perhaps it is an Australian thing but it makes Hazel quite unreliable for me and reliability is one of the things I value most about this terrific utility.

If this behaviour can't be changed is there another way for me to get Hazel to identify a short month in the format my statements contain; "Jan" rather than "Jan."?

Cheers Grant

Are you on Sierra and is your language set to something besides US english? If so, then the problem is that Apple, for some reason, has made the abbreviated month names have a period at the end.

A workaround is to add US english to the end of the list. Hazel will use all languages in that list and US english doesn't have the periods at the end.

Thanks for that. I'll check it out as soon as I can. I am on Sierra now but the problem predates that. It happened as soon as I updated to v4. I'll let you know what I find.

Mr_Noodle wrote:Are you on Sierra and is your language set to something besides US english? If so, then the problem is that Apple, for some reason, has made the abbreviated month names have a period at the end.

A workaround is to add US english to the end of the list. Hazel will use all languages in that list and US english doesn't have the periods at the end.

This is exactly what I had to do. I added US English to the list of preferred languages in the "Language and Region" System Preference pane and the problem vanished.

For others who might be looking for this information, I'd try this even if you're not on Sierra. I can't swear to it but I was sure I saw this before I upgraded to Sierra. Perhaps I'm dreaming though.

Thanks for the help Chief Noodler.

Cheers,

Grant