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| .TH curl_getdate 3 "12 Aug 2005" "libcurl 7.0" "libcurl Manual" |
| .SH NAME |
| curl_getdate - Convert a date string to number of seconds since January 1, |
| 1970 |
| .SH SYNOPSIS |
| .B #include <curl/curl.h> |
| .sp |
| .BI "time_t curl_getdate(char *" datestring ", time_t *"now " );" |
| .ad |
| .SH DESCRIPTION |
| This function returns the number of seconds since January 1st 1970 in the UTC |
| time zone, for the date and time that the \fIdatestring\fP parameter |
| specifies. The \fInow\fP parameter is not used, pass a NULL there. |
| |
| \fBNOTE:\fP This function was rewritten for the 7.12.2 release and this |
| documentation covers the functionality of the new one. The new one is not |
| feature-complete with the old one, but most of the formats supported by the |
| new one was supported by the old too. |
| .SH PARSING DATES AND TIMES |
| A "date" is a string containing several items separated by whitespace. The |
| order of the items is immaterial. A date string may contain many flavors of |
| items: |
| .TP 0.8i |
| .B calendar date items |
| Can be specified several ways. Month names can only be three-letter english |
| abbreviations, numbers can be zero-prefixed and the year may use 2 or 4 digits. |
| Examples: 06 Nov 1994, 06-Nov-94 and Nov-94 6. |
| .TP |
| .B time of the day items |
| This string specifies the time on a given day. You must specify it with 6 |
| digits with two colons: HH:MM:SS. To not include the time in a date string, |
| will make the function assume 00:00:00. Example: 18:19:21. |
| .TP |
| .B time zone items |
| Specifies international time zone. There are a few acronyms supported, but in |
| general you should instead use the specific relative time compared to |
| UTC. Supported formats include: -1200, MST, +0100. |
| .TP |
| .B day of the week items |
| Specifies a day of the week. Days of the week may be spelled out in full |
| (using english): `Sunday', `Monday', etc or they may be abbreviated to their |
| first three letters. This is usually not info that adds anything. |
| .TP |
| .B pure numbers |
| If a decimal number of the form YYYYMMDD appears, then YYYY is read as the |
| year, MM as the month number and DD as the day of the month, for the specified |
| calendar date. |
| .PP |
| .SH EXAMPLES |
| .nf |
| Sun, 06 Nov 1994 08:49:37 GMT |
| Sunday, 06-Nov-94 08:49:37 GMT |
| Sun Nov 6 08:49:37 1994 |
| 06 Nov 1994 08:49:37 GMT |
| 06-Nov-94 08:49:37 GMT |
| Nov 6 08:49:37 1994 |
| 06 Nov 1994 08:49:37 |
| 06-Nov-94 08:49:37 |
| 1994 Nov 6 08:49:37 |
| GMT 08:49:37 06-Nov-94 Sunday |
| 94 6 Nov 08:49:37 |
| 1994 Nov 6 |
| 06-Nov-94 |
| Sun Nov 6 94 |
| 1994.Nov.6 |
| Sun/Nov/6/94/GMT |
| Sun, 06 Nov 1994 08:49:37 CET |
| 06 Nov 1994 08:49:37 EST |
| Sun, 12 Sep 2004 15:05:58 -0700 |
| Sat, 11 Sep 2004 21:32:11 +0200 |
| 20040912 15:05:58 -0700 |
| 20040911 +0200 |
| .fi |
| .SH STANDARDS |
| This parser was written to handle date formats specified in RFC 822 (including |
| the update in RFC 1123) using time zone name or time zone delta and RFC 850 |
| (obsoleted by RFC 1036) and ANSI C's asctime() format. These formats are the |
| only ones RFC2616 says HTTP applications may use. |
| .SH RETURN VALUE |
| This function returns -1 when it fails to parse the date string. Otherwise it |
| returns the number of seconds as described. |
| |
| If the year is larger than 2037 on systems with 32 bit time_t, this function |
| will return 0x7fffffff (since that is the largest possible signed 32 bit |
| number). |
| |
| Having a 64 bit time_t is not a guarantee that dates beyond 03:14:07 UTC, |
| January 19, 2038 will work fine. On systems with a 64 bit time_t but with a |
| crippled mktime(), \fIcurl_getdate\fP will return -1 in this case. |
| .SH REWRITE |
| The former version of this function was built with yacc and was not only very |
| large, it was also never quite understood and it wasn't possible to build with |
| non-GNU tools since only GNU Bison could make it thread-safe! |
| |
| The rewrite was done for 7.12.2. The new one is much smaller and uses simpler |
| code. |
