1 .\" You can view this file with:
3 .\" $Id: curl_getdate.3,v 1.1.1.1 2008-09-23 16:32:05 hoffman Exp $
5 .TH curl_getdate 3 "12 Aug 2005" "libcurl 7.0" "libcurl Manual"
7 curl_getdate - Convert an date string to number of seconds since January 1,
10 .B #include <curl/curl.h>
12 .BI "time_t curl_getdate(char *" datestring ", time_t *"now " );"
15 This function returns the number of seconds since January 1st 1970 in the UTC
16 time zone, for the date and time that the \fIdatestring\fP parameter
17 specifies. The \fInow\fP parameter is not used, pass a NULL there.
19 \fBNOTE:\fP This function was rewritten for the 7.12.2 release and this
20 documentation covers the functionality of the new one. The new one is not
21 feature-complete with the old one, but most of the formats supported by the
22 new one was supported by the old too.
23 .SH PARSING DATES AND TIMES
24 A "date" is a string containing several items separated by whitespace. The
25 order of the items is immaterial. A date string may contain many flavors of
28 .B calendar date items
29 Can be specified several ways. Month names can only be three-letter english
30 abbrivations, numbers can be zero-prefixed and the year may use 2 or 4 digits.
31 Examples: 06 Nov 1994, 06-Nov-94 and Nov-94 6.
33 .B time of the day items
34 This string specifies the time on a given day. You must specify it with 6
35 digits with two colons: HH:MM:SS. To not include the time in a date string,
36 will make the function assume 00:00:00. Example: 18:19:21.
39 Specifies international time zone. There are a few acronyms supported, but in
40 general you should instead use the specific relative time compared to
41 UTC. Supported formats include: -1200, MST, +0100.
43 .B day of the week items
44 Specifies a day of the week. Days of the week may be spelled out in full
45 (using english): `Sunday', `Monday', etc or they may be abbreviated to their
46 first three letters. This is usually not info that adds anything.
49 If a decimal number of the form YYYYMMDD appears, then YYYY is read as the
50 year, MM as the month number and DD as the day of the month, for the specified
55 Sun, 06 Nov 1994 08:49:37 GMT
56 Sunday, 06-Nov-94 08:49:37 GMT
57 Sun Nov 6 08:49:37 1994
58 06 Nov 1994 08:49:37 GMT
59 06-Nov-94 08:49:37 GMT
64 GMT 08:49:37 06-Nov-94 Sunday
71 Sun, 06 Nov 1994 08:49:37 CET
72 06 Nov 1994 08:49:37 EST
73 Sun, 12 Sep 2004 15:05:58 -0700
74 Sat, 11 Sep 2004 21:32:11 +0200
75 20040912 15:05:58 -0700
79 This parser was written to handle date formats specified in RFC 822 (including
80 the update in RFC 1123) using time zone name or time zone delta and RFC 850
81 (obsoleted by RFC 1036) and ANSI C's asctime() format. These formats are the
82 only ones RFC2616 says HTTP applications may use.
84 This function returns -1 when it fails to parse the date string. Otherwise it
85 returns the number of seconds as described.
87 If the year is larger than 2037 on systems with 32 bit time_t, this function
88 will return 0x7fffffff (since that is the largest possible signed 32 bit
91 Having a 64 bit time_t is not a guarantee that dates beyond 03:14:07 UTC,
92 January 19, 2038 will work fine. On systems with a 64 bit time_t but with a
93 crippled mktime(), \fIcurl_getdate\fP will return -1 in this case.
95 The former version of this function was built with yacc and was not only very
96 large, it was also never quite understood and it wasn't possible to build with
97 non-GNU tools since only GNU Bison could make it thread-safe!
99 The rewrite was done for 7.12.2. The new one is much smaller and use simpler