Parsing ISO 8601 compatible standard timestamp format (yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss+-ZONE)

[dusko]

Is there any possibility to support ISO 8601 compatible standard timestamp format (yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss+-ZONE) with timezone offset?

library(anytime)
Sys.setenv(TZ=anytime:::getTZ())      ## helper function to try to get TZ
anytime("2016-12-13T17:09:48+01:00")

> anytime("2016-12-13T17:09:48+01:00")
[1] "2016-12-12 23:00:00 UTC"

Thanks,
Dusan

[eddelbuettel]

There is a function testFormat() just for that so that you can test formats:

R> anytime:::testFormat("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z", "2016-12-13T17:09:48+01:00")
[1] "2016-12-13 17:09:48 CST"
R> anytime:::testFormat("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z", "2016-12-13T17:09:48-03:00")
[1] "2016-12-13 17:09:48 CST"
R> 

As you can see, the date is parsed (good, and better than what we have now) but the actual tz argument is always ignored -- and that is documented -- which is bad.

But yes, ISO is good. I will add some variants. Luckily this seems tolerant to with/without T and seems to equally ignore tz suffixes of the -0000 and -00:00 variants.

[eddelbuettel]

Ok, I just added it, with this test block:

cat("\n") # ISO 8601 variants, note that TZ field is always ignored, see Boost documentation
anytime(c("2016-09-01T10:11:12-05:00", "2016-09-01T10:11:12.345678-05:00"))
anytime(c("2016-09-01T10:11:12-0500",  "2016-09-01T10:11:12.345678-0500"))
anytime(c("2016-09-01T10:11:12 CDT",   "2016-09-01T10:11:12.345678 CDT"))

The wierd thing is that the ones on the right were already being parsed in the just-release 0.1.2. Now we also get the ones on the left which is good.

[dusko]

Thank you very much! Works great in version 0.2.0.