International Standards for Dates and Times
International Standard ISO 8601 specifies numeric representations of date and time.
RWDateTime supports this standard, enabling you to construct from any ISO 8601-compliant string an
RWDateTime object.
The application of the ISO standard helps to avoid confusion among international users and support your application’s portability. Using the ISO standard offers you the following benefits:
• language independence
• consistency with the common 24-hour time notation system
• easy comparison and sorting of combined dates and times
• compatibility with many international notations, including the Chinese date notation, which already uses the sorting order of year-month-day
• a four-digit year representation
The ISO 8601 format may be used with the Gregorian and the Julian systems, as well as many others.
The Essential Tools Module provides two ISO 8601 parsers, discussed in
“SourcePro’s ISO 8601 Parsers”.
SourcePro’s ISO 8601 Parsers
SourcePro provides two parsers that can be used by
RWDateTime to parse ISO 8601 date-time values. The date formats available to you depend on the parser you use.
• SourcePro ISO 8601:2000 Parser
The default parser used by
RWDateTime. Parses dates, times, and date-times in the ISO 8601:2000 standard formats.
• SourcePro ISO 8601 Compatibility Parser
The original parser used by
RWDateTime. This parser maintains backward compatibility for applications parsing strings compatible with earlier versions of SourcePro.
For details on each of these parsers, see the SourcePro C++ API Reference Guide, and select the Related Pages tab.