Why Is My Todo Txt Not Parsing Due Dates In Taskwarrior?

Okay, here's the lowdown from my painfully curious, tinkering brain: the most common reason your todo.txt lines aren’t translating their due dates into Taskwarrior is that Taskwarrior doesn’t natively speak the todo.txt format. If you just run something like 'task import todo.txt', Taskwarrior expects its own JSON export format, not plain todo.txt key:value pairs. That means either you need a converter that turns todo.txt into Taskwarrior JSON or you need to feed Taskwarrior explicit 'task add' commands that include a properly formatted due attribute.

When I debug this kind of thing I split the problem into two small checks. First, confirm the raw string in todo.txt: a valid todo.txt due token looks like due:YYYY-MM-DD (e.g., due:2025-09-07). If your file uses slashes (09/07/2025), a different ordering (DD-MM-YYYY), or natural words like due:tomorrow, the importer may not understand it. Second, test Taskwarrior itself by hand: run a single manual command such as task add Buy milk due:2025-09-07 and then list tasks. If Taskwarrior accepts that, the issue is the conversion step. If it rejects it, examine Taskwarrior’s date parsing — it prefers ISO-style dates or full ISO timestamps (YYYY-MM-DD or YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ).

Other little gremlins I’ve hit: Windows line endings or a BOM can confuse parsers, stray whitespace or punctuation after the date token (like due:2025-09-07,) can break detection, and some older converter scripts only look for lowercase tokens or exact spacing. My practical workflow is to run a small conversion script (there are community 'todo.txt to Taskwarrior' scripts on GitHub) or write a short Python loop that reads each todo line, extracts the due: token, normalizes to YYYY-MM-DD, and either calls 'task add' or emits Taskwarrior JSON for 'task import'. Try debugging with a single task first, and if you want I can sketch a tiny conversion snippet to run locally — I love these little automation puzzles and it usually takes one edited regex to get everything flowing smoothly.

I like to keep things snappy when I’m troubleshooting late at night, so here’s a quick checklist that usually fixes todo.txt → Taskwarrior due-date issues.

1) Confirm format: make sure your todo.txt uses due:YYYY-MM-DD. If it’s due:09/07/2025 or due:7 Sep 2025, convert it to ISO. 2) Remember Taskwarrior won’t magically parse plain todo.txt — you need a converter or to add tasks with 'task add' including the due token. 3) Test with one manual add, e.g. task add Buy milk due:2025-09-07; if that works, your Taskwarrior date parsing is fine. 4) Watch out for CRLF/BOM, trailing commas, or stray parentheses around the date which can hide the token from simple parsers. 5) If you’re using a third-party import script, check its docs or update it — some scripts only accept exact token formats.

If you want a quick hack: extract lines containing due:, normalize the date strings with a small Python snippet or a tool that understands dates, then either call 'task add' in a loop or produce Taskwarrior-compatible JSON for 'task import'. That usually gets me up and running in ten minutes, and I’m happy to walk through a short script with you if you want to paste a couple of sample lines from your file.