FreeBSD Man Pages

strptime(3)

NAME

     strptime -- parse date and time string

LIBRARY

     Standard C Library (libc, -lc)

SYNOPSIS

     #include <time.h>

     char *
     strptime(const char * restrict buf, const char * restrict format,
	 struct tm * restrict timeptr);

DESCRIPTION

     The strptime() function parses the string in the buffer buf according to
     the string pointed to by format, and fills in the elements of the struc-
     ture pointed to by timeptr.  The resulting values will be relative to the
     local time zone.  Thus, it can be considered the reverse operation of
     strftime(3).

     The format string consists of zero or more conversion specifications and
     ordinary characters.  All ordinary characters are matched exactly with
     the buffer, where white space in the format string will match any amount
     of white space in the buffer.  All conversion specifications are identi-
     cal to those described in strftime(3).

     Two-digit year values, including formats %y and %D, are now interpreted
     as beginning at 1969 per POSIX requirements.  Years 69-00 are interpreted
     in the 20th century (1969-2000), years 01-68 in the 21st century
     (2001-2068).

     If the format string does not contain enough conversion specifications to
     completely specify the resulting struct tm, the unspecified members of
     timeptr are left untouched.  For example, if format is ``%H:%M:%S'', only
     tm_hour, tm_sec and tm_min will be modified.  If time relative to today
     is desired, initialize the timeptr structure with today's date before
     passing it to strptime().

RETURN VALUES

     Upon successful completion, strptime() returns the pointer to the first
     character in buf that has not been required to satisfy the specified con-
     versions in format.  It returns NULL if one of the conversions failed.

SEE ALSO

     date(1), scanf(3), strftime(3)

AUTHORS

     The strptime() function has been contributed by Powerdog Industries.

     This man page was written by Jorg Wunsch.

HISTORY

     The strptime() function appeared in FreeBSD 3.0.

BUGS

     Both the %e and %l format specifiers may incorrectly scan one too many
     digits if the intended values comprise only a single digit and that digit

     The %U and %W format specifiers accept any value within the range 00 to
     53 without validating against other values supplied (like month or day of
     the year, for example).

     The %Z format specifier only accepts time zone abbreviations of the local
     time zone, or the value "GMT".  This limitation is because of ambiguity
     due to of the over loading of time zone abbreviations.  One such example
     is EST which is both Eastern Standard Time and Eastern Australia Summer
     Time.

     The strptime() function does not correctly handle multibyte characters in
     the format argument.

FreeBSD 5.4			January 4, 2003 		   FreeBSD 5.4

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