[tz] strftime and nonnormalized dates/times

Paul Eggert eggert at cs.ucla.edu
Thu Jul 5 14:38:10 UTC 2018


Steve Summit wrote:
> I'm now thinking that somewhere there's a world where it might
> be fun to map out-of-range tm_mon and tm_yday values to Tricember,
> Pentember, Dodecahember

There's another point I forgot to mention, stretching things from the 
application side instead of from the implementation side.

strftime is required to support dates that are not in the Gregorian calendar. 
For example, a program using the Julian calendar can fill in a struct tm with 
the date February 29, 1900, and strftime is obliged to process it to the 
corresponding string even though this date does not exist in the Gregorian 
calendar. This is well-defined in C11 and POSIX-2017. You can even process 
"February 30, 1712" (a valid date in Sweden!) using strftime.

Similarly for timestamps. You can use strftime with "%H:%M:%S" to generate the 
timestamp 07:32:60 if you like, even if the implementation conforms strictly to 
POSIX and does not support leap seconds at all.


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