Re: [Gnuplot-info] format string exclusion

[<br...@ph...>]

seb...@ph... wrote:
> I am fighting in trying to read the standard output of the Unix date 
> command with a timefmt string (e.g. Wed Dec 29 11:26:56 EST 2004).

That's going to be tricky --- if nothing else, the 'EST' thingy is 
almost guaranteed to be a royal pain.

It'd be a good deal easier to parse a format meant for computers, not 
humans, to read.  'date' can produce a rich variety of such formats.

> In the official Gnuplot documentation I can read that "the format string 
> must exclude this text".

Where 'this text' is the weekday name... yes, it must.

> Does this mean that the day in my example must be excluded from my data 
> file or does it mean
> that there is a way to exclude it in the format string itself.

You have to avoid it in both, effectively.  But you can ignore the 
weekday column in the data file by increasing the 'using' column number 
by one, so it can still be in the file if you have to.

But your best option is to choose a more suitable timestamp format in 
whatever application is producing these data.