good ways to convert string into time

[Peter Hansen]

Hank wrote:
> 
> i have a string as follows
> 
> 18Nov2003:18:23:43:405

It's a minor point, but what happens for days-of-the-month that are
less than 10?  Leading zero, or one character shorter?  Same question
goes for the other fields, I suppose...

> Is there an easy way to convert that to absolute time? What i really
> want to do is to parse these times from a log file and do time
> comparisons, averages, stop minus start (elapsed).
> 
> Probably create my own conversion table i guess?

Probably not, actually...

-Peter