z.date documentation needed

Discussed in https://github.com/colinhacks/zod/discussions/879

<div type='discussions-op-text'>

^{Originally posted by blocka January 24, 2022} Very surprised that I could not find anything on this.

If I have a date schema const schema = z.date() and I pass it a date string schema.parse('2022-01-12T00:00:00.000Z') I would expect to get back a JS Date object. Instead I get an exception that I’ve passed a string instead of a date. …</div>

There really should be some documentation in the README about how z.date works.

[JacobWeisenburger]

I agree completely.

I think the “parse, don’t validate” thing is confusing. I have been using Zod for awhile now and so I get how it works. But I still don’t get the reasoning behind “parse, don’t validate”. To me, leaving the implementation of parse and safeParse the way they are is fine, but renaming them to validate and safeValidate or something would help with some of the confusion. But that’s just me…

[scotttrinh]

@JacobWeisenburger

Started a discussion to talk about forming a documentation working group if you’re interested: https://github.com/colinhacks/zod/discussions/911