fix: EalingCouncil/LondonBoroughEaling: Use collectionDate not collectionDateString

[wjt]

These modules cannot parse the current data for my address, with the following error:

Failed setup, will retry: Unexpected error: unconverted data remains:
,24/03/2026

(I do not know which of the two almost identical implementations I am using - #1884.)

Looking at the council website's response to the POST request, included below after being pretty-printed with jq, the problem is that the garden waste bin has the following value for collectionDateString:

"collectionDateString": "24/03/2026,24/03/2026",

But the code expects this to contain a single date.

Instead, use the collectionDate property, which contains a list of dates, and take the first element. (The council website instead splits the collectionDateString on comma.)

Resolves #1885

Summary by CodeRabbit

• Bug Fixes
  • Fixed collection date retrieval for Ealing Council services. Dates are now correctly parsed from API responses.

[coderabbitai]

No actionable comments were generated in the recent review. 🎉

ℹ️ Recent review info

⚙️ Run configuration

Configuration used: defaults

Review profile: CHILL

Plan: Pro

Run ID: ca41e498-07c6-45d9-8af6-4dae58893a0b

📥 Commits

Reviewing files that changed from the base of the PR and between f5adb70 and 57c8b1a.

📒 Files selected for processing (2)

• uk_bin_collection/uk_bin_collection/councils/EalingCouncil.py
• uk_bin_collection/uk_bin_collection/councils/LondonBoroughEaling.py

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📝 Walkthrough

Walkthrough

Two Ealing Council implementations are updated to extract collection dates from the collectionDate array instead of the collectionDateString field, which contains multiple comma-separated dates that fail parsing.

Changes

Cohort / File(s)	Summary
Ealing Council Date Extraction uk_bin_collection/uk_bin_collection/councils/EalingCouncil.py, uk_bin_collection/uk_bin_collection/councils/LondonBoroughEaling.py	Modified date extraction to use collectionDate[0] instead of collectionDateString, preventing parsing failures from multi-date comma-separated values.

Estimated code review effort

🎯 1 (Trivial) | ⏱️ ~5 minutes

Suggested reviewers

• dp247

Poem

🐰 A hop through the bins with glee,
Array parsing, as it should be!
No more commas to cause a fright,
Just the first date, clean and right! ♻️

🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 4 | ❌ 1

❌ Failed checks (1 warning)

Check name	Status	Explanation	Resolution
Docstring Coverage	⚠️ Warning	Docstring coverage is 0.00% which is insufficient. The required threshold is 80.00%.	Write docstrings for the functions missing them to satisfy the coverage threshold.

✅ Passed checks (4 passed)

Check name	Status	Explanation
Description Check	✅ Passed	Check skipped - CodeRabbit’s high-level summary is enabled.
Title check	✅ Passed	The title accurately and specifically describes the main change: switching from using collectionDateString to collectionDate in the Ealing council modules.
Linked Issues check	✅ Passed	The changes directly address issue #1885 by replacing collectionDateString with collectionDate[0], fixing the parsing failure for services with comma-separated dates.
Out of Scope Changes check	✅ Passed	All changes are strictly scoped to fixing the date parsing issue in the two Ealing council modules as specified in the linked issue.

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[wjt]

The alternative is to add all elements of the array to the collection days, which is what the council website does:

but… what's the use in that.

[robbrad]

Merged into the combined March 2026 release PR #1898. Closing to reduce release noise. Thank you for the contribution!