There is a god somewhere, dispensing Cosmic Karma as deserved. Yesterday I posted in the original thread: The Java SimpleDateFormat has a similar gotcha co

There is a god somewhere, dispensing Cosmic Karma as deserved. Yesterday I posted in the original thread: The Java SimpleDateFormat has a similar gotcha concerning %k vs %h Today one of my self-written utilities crashes in a weird way. Hacky as it was, it did its job nicely for over two months. Half an hour troubleshooting later it turns out the DATE FORMAT STRING is WRONG. Really. I kid you not. Neither %k nor %h turns out to be right, this specific program has a 1/86400 chance of absolutely requiring %H . Then again, the standard format strings would not have helped here, I need to match the undocumented behavior of an existing program. And it only crashes when someone inputs something at exactly 00:00:00 and so far no bleary eyed user had to burn the midnight oil. It is in test for now. In 8 days, this baby aids the data migration to production. This bug would have aborted the launch of a program which has to be released before the GDPR awakens. Very close call. There is a lesson about hubris somewhere in here.