How should I deal with missing or impossible-looking times?¶

Preserve the original value, investigate its source and reduce precision rather than silently correcting or discarding it.

Diagnose the anomaly¶

Blank, epoch, future or impossible dates can result from empty fields, placeholder values, wrong units or epoch, time-zone conversion, clock error, corruption or parser support. Establish the raw field, stored number, units, record state and application version; another validated method may interpret it differently.

Use order or a range when exact time fails¶

Provider events, neighbouring rows, notifications and participant records may place the event between reliable boundaries. Document any supported conversion or clock adjustment and which record types it affects. An inherited file time or later cloud download can also explain a sequence that only appears impossible.