I am developing an application that should accept arbitrarily formatted dates -- in other words, if it walks like date, talks like a date, it's a date.

I have attempted to adapt the date format parser from the moment.js package to generate a format string with some partial success but have run into a situation where the input string in it has some element that is not recognized.

For instance, there seems to be no proper format to deal with the string

`Thu Nov 07 2019 13:50:03 GMT-0800 (PST)`

-- or, at least one which seems clear to me but perhaps I'm missing something in the documentation.

I have looked at <https://pub.dev/documentation/intl/latest/intl/DateFormat-class.html> but I see no way of, for instance, ignoring fields that may be irrelevant or encoding the format correctly (for instance the `GMT-0800` field).

I am using the **jiffy** package to do the date parsing if that matters.

Following up: I suspect what I'm looking for is something that acts more or less like `strptime()` in the C language. Or maybe not.