Tech Tip: Converting MultiValue Dates to Internet Dates
These days we have to interact with other systems, which also means interacting with other dates and times. UTC dates is a common date that we run into, as well as RFC1123 dates, which are commonly found in web data.
UTC (Universal Time Conversion) is a unique format that, while easy to generate and parse, sometimes can cause confusion.
yyyymmddThhmmssZ = 20100301T100000Z
This translates into 03/01/2010 10:00:00 AM GMT (Greenwich Mean Time).
To convert to GMT requires you to provide some additional information about the date and time information on your servers.
RFC1123 is a common format in e-mails, but can also be found in other web data. While it does the same things as UTC, its format is a little more human readable.
mmm dd, yyyy hh:mm:ss GMT = Mar 01 2010 10:00:00 GMT
Again, you see the GMT, while you can use other time zones with RFC1123, many times it's easier to just use GMT.
I have supplied a program that will help you convert your internal date/time information into one of these 2 standard date/time formats:
LOCAL.DATE = DATE() LOCAL.TIME = TIME() LOCAL.TIMEZONE = "PST" CALL CONVERT.DATETIME.TO.UTC1(LOCAL.DATE,LOCAL.TIME,LOCAL.TIMEZONE,UTC,RFC1123.DATE,GMT.INFO,"") CRT "UTC: ": UTC CRT "RFC1123: ": RFC1123.DATE CRT "GMT: ": GMT END
You can get the source for this subroutine at:
www.intl-spectrum.com/resource/134/UTC_RFC1123_Conversion.aspx
Fig. 1
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