The C time library among the most hacky and full of outdated heuristics. This library and the article created both are meant to demonstrate the subtler flaws of the inbuilt library. And show what could've been of the time library.
date_t is a floating point value of seconds since the epoch gotten by date(), this can be passed either
to tocal()/wdayof()/ydayof() to directly handle human-friendly values or passed to printfdate() to directly
print the time as a string based off these printf-style formatters:
- s - seconds
- Us - microseconds
- Ns - nanoseconds
- m - minutes
- h - hours
- ch - clock hours (12-hour time)
- ih - indicator for hours (AM/PM)
- d - Month day
- w - Full weekday
- aw - Abbreviated weekday
- nw - Number of weekday
- M - month name
- aM - Abbreviated month
- nM - Number of month
- y - year
- Dy - day of year
- Cy - Century
- z - zone name
- oz - zone offset
- nz - index name of zone (i.e.
America/New_York)
The timezone API in C is particularly horrendous. In this library you can get the name of a timezone with tznameat(),
the offset with tzoffat(), the time in the timezone with intz(), the time in your local timezone with inmytz()
(and the timezone itself with mytz()).