suggested improvements for C9x `New formats for strftime()' (N733)

[Paul Eggert]

You propose new conversion specifiers for strftime in C9x, the new C standard,
in your document ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG14 N733
<http://www.gold.net/users/cdwf/c/wg14n733.txt> (1997-07-01).
Here are a couple of quotes from that document,
followed by some suggestions for improvements.


      %f   is replaced by the weekday as a decimal number (1-7), where
	   Monday is 1 (the ISO 8601 weekday number).

Please change this from %f to %u, because %u is current practice.
I believe %u was introduced several years ago in Arnold Robbins's
public domain strftime, and it is now the standard in many strftime
implementations, including the Arthur David Olson public domain strftime
<ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/>, the GNU C library
<ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/>, 4.4BSD (e.g. BSD/OS), Linux, and Solaris.

%u is also required by POSIX.2's `date' command to have the same meaning
(please see IEEE Std 1003.2-1992 section 4.15.4.1 page 241 line 2931);
it would be odd for C9x to diverge unnecessarily from POSIX in this respect.


      %V   is replaced by the ISO 8601 week number of the year

%V does not suffice to support ISO 8601 week-oriented dates,
because the ISO 8601 week's year may not be the same as the current year.
For example, using ISO 8601 week notation, `1997-W01-2' denotes 1996-12-31
(as the first ISO week of 1997 begins on 1996-12-30).
Similarly, `1998-W53-5' denotes 1999-01-01.  If only %V is available,
there's no easy way for a C program to output ISO-format dates
like `1997-W01-2'.

To work around this shortcoming, I propose that C9x add Robbins's
%G and %g formats, as follows:

   %G is replaced by the year containing the ISO 8601 week
   %g is replaced by %G modulo 100

E.g. the format "%G-W%V-%u" outputs the ISO 8601 full week-oriented date,
and the format "%gW%V%u" outputs the ISO 8601 format containing the
week-oriented date without century or punctuation.

%G and %g were introduced more recently by Robbins,
and they are also current practice, though not as widespread as %u:
they are supported by the Robbins and Olson public-domain implementations,
the GNU C library, and Linux.