datetime iso8601 string input

[Ben Finney]

Magnus Lycka <lycka at carmen.se> writes:

> As I've written before, the ISO 8601 spec contains many variations
> in date formats. Making a full ISO 8601 parser is probably possible
> if we ignore time deltas, but it's hardly worth the effort. Writing
> something that parses a few percent of the possible ISO 8601
> messages and calling that an ISO 8601 parser seems silly to me.

The abundance of formats specified by ISO 8601 is indeed a barrier to
simple implementation of ISO-8601-consuming methods.

In response to this, the IETF have made RFC 3339:

   "This document defines a date and time format for use in Internet
   protocols that is a profile of the ISO 8601 standard for
   representation of dates and times using the Gregorian calendar."
   <URL:http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3339.txt>

By "profile", the document essentially means a much more limited
subset of the myriad formats in ISO 8601, precisely to allow simple
conversion of timestamps to and from the format.

Could this be a candidate for a "default" consumption format for
date-time strings?

-- 
 \          "It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one |
  `\       trifling exception, is composed of others."  -- John Andrew |
_o__)                                                           Holmes |
Ben Finney