Thanks for the thorough pull request, but the case you're trying to address is an invalid feed format. All date-times in RSS must conform to RFC 822. Date-times in Atom feeds must conform to RFC 3339. It's not a matter of i18n/l10n -- that feed is just invalid.

I am inclined not to implement this.

Even though it's spec-invalid it still exists out in the wild and a lot of the time the feed owner isn't going to fix their end. Obviously you can't address every invalid case, but this one is going to be probably the most common case of spec non-conformity, the fix seems harmless and makes node-feedparser that little bit more useful (and saves me from maintaining a fork... 👍 )

Just my two cents though - I'll now shut up.

exists out in the wild

Do you have some links? When I checked the feed linked in your example, it's a valid feed (although it's only got one article from nearly three years ago).

here is where I got the example from. What with it also containing the wrong link it seems a bit crap overall, so I'm happy for you to bin the pull request and I'll keep this feature in my fork only (unfortunately I have to work with this feed and there is an almost 0 chance of getting it fixed...). I've come across similar ones but on the same site - not anywhere else so far.

@jamessharp I wouldn't want to maintain a fork for this either. Plus you'll miss all the bug fixes! 😄

Luckily, you don't need to maintain a fork -- you can just override the handleMeta and handleItem methods to "massage" those dates into shape, like so:

var feedparser = require('feedparser')
  , moment = require('moment');

var feed = 'http://www.esinet.norfolk.gov.uk/cadmin/ecourier/govmi.xml';
var fmt = 'DD/MM/YYYY HH:mm:ss';

// Save the original methods to apply after we're done massaging
var handleMeta = feedparser.prototype.handleMeta;
var handleItem = feedparser.prototype.handleItem;

// Override the methods to massage those bad dates
feedparser.prototype.handleMeta = function (node, type, options) {
  if (node['pubdate'] && node['pubdate']['#']) {
    node['pubdate']['#'] = moment(node['pubdate']['#'], fmt).toJSON();
  }
  if (node['lastbuilddate'] && node['lastbuilddate']['#']) {
    node['lastbuilddate']['#'] = moment(node['lastbuilddate']['#'], fmt).toJSON();
  }
  // Now that we've fixed up the malformatted dates, apply the original method
  return handleMeta.apply(this, arguments);
};

feedparser.prototype.handleItem = function (node, type, options) {
  if (node['pubdate'] && node['pubdate']['#']) {
    node['pubdate']['#'] = moment(node['pubdate']['#'], fmt).toJSON();
  }
  // see handleMeta, above -- ditto here
  return handleItem.apply(this, arguments);
};

feedparser.parseUrl(feed).on('complete', function (meta, articles) { 
  console.log(meta.title);
  console.log(meta.date);
  articles.forEach(function (article) {
    console.log('%s - %s', article.title, article.pubdate);
  });
  console.log('Woot!');
});