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* Prior Art

func who where ----------------------------------------------------- dparsetime() RAND/UCI MH getabsdate() Moraes C News getdate() USL Sys V Rel 4 getdate() Bellovin/Salz/Berets B News parsedate() Hamey/Accetta Mach partime() Harrenstien/Eggert RCS strptime() Harris SunOS 4.1[.x]

Are there any routines available that take a "format" parameter so that they can scan dates that are in ambiguous formats.

strptime() [at least] falls into this category -- I believed Guy intended it as the inverse of strptime() [or at least as close as you can get]. So, ... char * strptime(buf, fmt, tm) char *buf; char *fmt; struct tm *tm; strptime() converts the character string pointed to by buf to a time value, which is stored in the tm structure pointed to by tm, using the format specified by fmt. It is available under SunOS.

I would like to be able to scan dates in any of the following formats:

M-D-Y T D-M-Y T

There is no getting around that those D/M-numeric forms are just plain ambiguous. The best you can do is to use some ``internationalization'' feature like setlocale(LC_TIME, ...), or to just prefer one over the other.

I would like to be able to scan dates in any of the following formats:

M-D-Y T D-M-Y T Y-M-D T M/D/Y T D/M/Y T Y/M/D T M D Y T D M Y T Y M D T M.D.Y T D.M.Y T Y.M.D T

Opinion: Any generalized date parser is overkill for these restricted situations. Brad