Is one aware of a date parsing function for c. I am looking for something like:
time = parse_time("9/10/2009");
printf("%d\n", time->date);
time2 = parse_time("Monday September 10th 2009")
time2 = parse_time("Monday September 10th 2009 12:30 AM")
Thank you
Unfortunately, the only thing in the standard library is getdate. It will handle many time formats, but you need to know the format in advance - not just pass a generic string to the function.
It's also not supported on Visual C++, if that's an issue for you. The Gnu C runtime supports this routine, however.
The Julian Library does much of what you ask -- see in particular how its parsing works. However I don't think it quite stretches ALL the way to your requirements (that Monday, I believe, would throw it for a spin;-).
In time.h you have strptime:
// Scan values from buf string into tptr struct. On success it returns pointer
// to the character following the last character parsed. Otherwise it returns null.
char * strptime(const char* buf, const char* format, struct tm* tptr)
which does the opposite of
// Format tm into a date/time string.
size t strftime(char* s, size t n, const char* format, const struct tm* tptr)
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There are two fairly common approaches in C:
Use strptime() with an array of supported formats you accept.
Bang head against table a lot, and then either give up or use another language which has a usable library already (like perl or python).
Git has a portable date parsing library, released under GPLv2. You may be able to use that. I think you want approxidate_careful().