Problem with os.date?

[Nick Gammon <nick@...>]

I was browsing through the code for os.date and spotted the extra  
feature - not mentioned in the book, but in the reference manual,  
that you can use "!" as the first character to use UTC rather than  
local time.

However if you use that character only, rather than get the default  
date string (%c) in UTC format you get an error about the format  
being too long:

print (os.date ("!")) --> 'date' format too long

That message is slightly confusing. Perhaps:

* Change to %c if the string is empty after removing the !

or

* Give an error 'no date string' or similar if the string is empty  
after removing the !

- Nick