[pkg/ottl] [Time] Add support for format and timezone

[michalpristas]

Component(s)

pkg/ottl

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

atm Time is simple and converts string to time.Time

Describe the solution you'd like

supporting custom format, timezone seems like a must for some of my use cases
and locale would be really nice to have

Describe alternatives you've considered

No response

Additional context

No response

Tasks

• updated docs [pkg/ottl] Updated docs for Time converter  #32185
• handling timezone leveraging location support we already have in a library [pkg/ottl] Added support for timezone in Time converter #32479
• adding support for locale into our time library (separate issue [pkg/ottl] Adding support for locale into our time parsing library #32977)
• exposing locale in Time converter (separate issue [pkg/ottl] Support for locale #32978)

[github-actions]

Pinging code owners:

• pkg/ottl: @TylerHelmuth @kentquirk @bogdandrutu @evan-bradley

See Adding Labels via Comments if you do not have permissions to add labels yourself.

[TylerHelmuth]

@michalpristas it seems that our docs for the Time function need some help.

The Time function requires as the first parameter the string to be converted and in the second parameter the format of the time the string represents.

We also should include in the Time function's section these conventions, as they are what let you specify the format of the time string, including timezone.

I agree that we could add support for locale. I believe this would be done via an optional string parameter.

Would you like to work on this?

[michalpristas]

yes, i believe this can be split in 2 PRs, one for doc one for locale

[michalpristas]

@TylerHelmuth as go does not support localization of datetime by default, i'm considering pulling some 3rd party library.
something like https://github.com/goodsign/monday

do you prefer internal implementation or something third party. I'm fine with both, implementation is not that difficult and we only need parsing part of that

[TylerHelmuth]

@michalpristas The library we are using now supports it. It's the same library stanza uses.

[michalpristas]

you sure it supports locales? what i'm looking at is internal/coreinternal/timeutils/parser.go
as a library it supports specifying custom location which i want to leverage when handling timezone arg

but i'm not finding support for locales such as it-IT when the tool i'm observing is producing Italian logs in a form of e.g mercoledì set 4 2024 parsing with a layout Monday Jan 2 2006 would yield 4th September 2024

maybe i'm just looking at the wrong place. i also went through go.mod dependencies but found nothing really

[TylerHelmuth]

You're right, I was thinking of the timeutils.GetLocation call handling timezone.

I agree we'd need to add a library or update timeutils to support this. @djaglowski how does stanza handle this?

[djaglowski]

pkg/stanza has a location parameter. This is already part of timeutils so this may just be a matter of exposing it through the OTTL function?

[djaglowski]

Ahh, nevermind. I was looking at time zone considerations only. I agree if we want to translate between languages we'll need to add new functionality.

[michalpristas]

thank you for looking into it, will work on adding functionality into our existing library as part of this issue

[michalpristas]

my plan here is 4 PRs to keep them small:

• updated docs [pkg/ottl] Updated docs for Time converter  #32185
• handling timezone leveraging location support we already have in a library(would location be better name than timezone i think i'm more in favor of location now)
• adding support for locale into our time library
• exposing locale in Time converter

will make sure docs update is part of every change

[michalpristas]

I extracted work on locales into 2 separate issues #32977 and #32978
should make it easier for people to pick them up, we can close this one as it was addressed in #32479