Template talk:Signing2

Bug
The template documentation shows the following syntax:

11:15, 1 June 2005 (UTC)

And this produces

—Jimbo Wales (talk • contribs) 11:15, 1 June 2005 (UTC)

But if I substitute a different date and my user name:

21:42, 18 September 2018‎ (UTC)

I get

—Largoplazo(UTC) (talk • contribs) 21:42, 18 September 2018‎ (UTC)

with the spurious "(UTC)" you can see tacked onto my name.

When I remove the explicit " (UTC)" from the first parameter, then I get the correct result:

—Largoplazo (talk • contribs) 21:42, 18 September 2018‎ (UTC)

What's going on? Largoplazo (talk) 02:29, 7 January 2019 (UTC)


 * You have a hidden character in your date string (following 2018) that is breaking the pattern matching. 21:42, 18 September 2018 (UTC) &rarr; —Largoplazo (talk • contribs) 21:42, 18 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Why is it doing pattern matching anyway? This template is actually a bit outdated: It's relying on (signing), which nowadays will just concatenate the two parameters, extract the date from there, and then create the signature from it; the order is no longer relevant. We /could/ decide to not do that here, but since everyone will want to use a valid date string anyway I think it's ok to break with invalid input. Instead, I'd recommend we redirect this template to signing since it's behaving exactly the same since 5 years.
 * Largoplazo &rarr; —Largoplazo (talk • contribs) 21:42, 18 September 2018 (UTC)
 * 21:42, 18 September 2018 (UTC) &rarr; —Largoplazo (talk • contribs) 21:42, 18 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Largoplazo &rarr; —Largoplazo (talk • contribs) 21:42, 18 September 2018 (UTC)
 * 21:42, 18 September 2018 (UTC) &rarr; —Largoplazo (talk • contribs) 21:42, 18 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Amalthea 09:12, 7 January 2019 (UTC)


 * Thanks for catching the hidden character. Strange, since the idea is that this template was created so we could copy and paste directly from histories, I assumed that I could actually do that. Largoplazo (talk) 16:07, 7 January 2019 (UTC)
 * That was the idea, but since then signing has been improved and it can handle all cases. It does work for me if I copy from the history of Wolfman12405's talk page: —Largoplazo (talk • contribs) 21:42, 18 September 2018‎ (UTC) . Not sure where that came from for you, at a glance I didn't see anything in your skin files to cause it. Amalthea  18:23, 7 January 2019 (UTC)