Re: formatting date according to timezones?

I think there might be a misconception here - the timezone suffix "+02:00"
means: "this is the local time in the timezone two hours ahead of UTC".

It does *not* mean "add two hours to the stated date-time to get the 'real'
date-time".

You don't state which timezone you want to express your outputs in - I'll
assume you mean UTC (Greenwich Meantime, to all intents and purposes). UTC
times may be denoted by timeszone suffix '+00:00', '-00:00', or simply 'Z'
(canonical form).

Timezones ahead of UTC have a positive offset e.g. '+01:00' would denote
Western European Time (also, British Summer Time, amongst others)

Timezones behind UTC have a negative offset e.g. '-05:00' would denote
Eastern Standard Time (also, Central Daylight Savings Time, amongst others)

Then:

2008-01-04T20:34:07.86+02:00 is the same instant-of-time as
2008-01-04T18:34:07.86Z (e.g. 8:34pm in Moscow is 6:34pm in London)
2008-01-04T20:34:07.86+05:00 is the same instant-of-time as
2008-01-04T15:34:07.86Z (e.g. 8:34pm in Islamabad is 3:34pm in London)

and:

2008-01-04T20:34:07.86-05:00 is the same instant-of-time as
2008-01-05T01:34:07Z (e.g. 8:34pm in New York is 1:34am the following
morning in London)

You can read more at http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-xmlschema-2-20041028 (
W3C/XML Schema Part 2: Datatypes Second Edition), see section 3.2.7
dateTime.

And no, the esxlt date: library does not support timezone conversions
(yet). Functions such as date:add will honour (retain) timezones, but there
is no facility for automatic "canonicalisation" of timezone.

Best regards,
Harry McAllister

Fixed Income Architecture
BNP Paribas




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A question regarding date formatting with exslt:

Is it possible to get the time zone taken into account, so that a new
date is calculated according to that for the output?

Some example to try to explain what I want to achieve:

for input data:
2008-01-04T20:34:07.86+02:00
i want the output to be
2008-01-04 22:34:07

for input data:
2008-01-04T20:34:07.86+05:00
should become
2008-01-05 01:34:07

and so on.

Any tips on how to achieve this?

cheers,

RJ
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