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22 .TH curl_getdate 3 "12 Aug 2005" "libcurl 7.0" "libcurl Manual"
24 curl_getdate - Convert a date string to number of seconds
26 .B #include <curl/curl.h>
28 .BI "time_t curl_getdate(char *" datestring ", time_t *"now " );"
31 \fIcurl_getdate(3)\fP returns the number of seconds since the Epoch, January
32 1st 1970 00:00:00 in the UTC time zone, for the date and time that the
33 \fIdatestring\fP parameter specifies. The \fInow\fP parameter is not used,
35 .SH PARSING DATES AND TIMES
36 A "date" is a string containing several items separated by whitespace. The
37 order of the items is immaterial. A date string may contain many flavors of
40 .B calendar date items
41 Can be specified several ways. Month names can only be three-letter english
42 abbreviations, numbers can be zero-prefixed and the year may use 2 or 4 digits.
43 Examples: 06 Nov 1994, 06-Nov-94 and Nov-94 6.
45 .B time of the day items
46 This string specifies the time on a given day. You must specify it with 6
47 digits with two colons: HH:MM:SS. To not include the time in a date string,
48 will make the function assume 00:00:00. Example: 18:19:21.
51 Specifies international time zone. There are a few acronyms supported, but in
52 general you should instead use the specific relative time compared to
53 UTC. Supported formats include: -1200, MST, +0100.
55 .B day of the week items
56 Specifies a day of the week. Days of the week may be spelled out in full
57 (using english): `Sunday', `Monday', etc or they may be abbreviated to their
58 first three letters. This is usually not info that adds anything.
61 If a decimal number of the form YYYYMMDD appears, then YYYY is read as the
62 year, MM as the month number and DD as the day of the month, for the specified
67 Sun, 06 Nov 1994 08:49:37 GMT
68 Sunday, 06-Nov-94 08:49:37 GMT
69 Sun Nov 6 08:49:37 1994
70 06 Nov 1994 08:49:37 GMT
71 06-Nov-94 08:49:37 GMT
76 GMT 08:49:37 06-Nov-94 Sunday
83 Sun, 06 Nov 1994 08:49:37 CET
84 06 Nov 1994 08:49:37 EST
85 Sun, 12 Sep 2004 15:05:58 -0700
86 Sat, 11 Sep 2004 21:32:11 +0200
87 20040912 15:05:58 -0700
91 This parser was written to handle date formats specified in RFC 822 (including
92 the update in RFC 1123) using time zone name or time zone delta and RFC 850
93 (obsoleted by RFC 1036) and ANSI C's asctime() format. These formats are the
94 only ones RFC2616 says HTTP applications may use.
96 This function returns -1 when it fails to parse the date string. Otherwise it
97 returns the number of seconds as described.
99 If the year is larger than 2037 on systems with 32 bit time_t, this function
100 will return 0x7fffffff (since that is the largest possible signed 32 bit
103 Having a 64 bit time_t is not a guarantee that dates beyond 03:14:07 UTC,
104 January 19, 2038 will work fine. On systems with a 64 bit time_t but with a
105 crippled mktime(), \fIcurl_getdate\fP will return -1 in this case.