Re: [Gnuplot-info] Making/finding a timefmt for the unix date command default output

[Hans-Bernhard B. <HBB...@t-...>]

Am 20.01.2018 um 16:20 schrieb Alan Corey:
> OK, I hadn't really tried parsing this format in Gnuplot before I
> don't think, I've done the more common American YY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.

To give credit where it's due: that format is really not American in any 
meaningful way.  That's an abridged version of the international format 
ISO 8601 offered by date -I.  That International Standard ended up 
looking that way in no small part because _somebody_ had to tackle that 
unholy mess created by the actual English and American formats: DD/MM/YY 
and MM/DD/YY.  And no, I won't even try to remember which of those was 
which.

> I
> thought Gnuplot date parsing was a more complete subset of strptime
> and strftime.  

It is.  But parsing the week day would not make sense for gnuplot, where 
strptime()'s output is not a struct tm, but rather the single 
time_t-style number.  In short, the weekday is entirely redundant in a 
classic date string, so all it could add to the input is a new problem, 
if it's given incorrectly.