curl_getdate.3: edited, removed references to pre 7.12.2 functionality

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.TH curl_getdate 3 "12 Aug 2005" "libcurl 7.0" "libcurl Manual"

.SH NAME

curl_getdate - Convert a date string to number of seconds since January 1,

1970

curl_getdate - Convert a date string to number of seconds

.SH SYNOPSIS

.B #include <curl/curl.h>

.sp

.BI "time_t curl_getdate(char *" datestring ", time_t *"now " );"

.ad

.SH DESCRIPTION

This function returns the number of seconds since January 1st 1970 in the UTC

time zone, for the date and time that the \fIdatestring\fP parameter

specifies. The \fInow\fP parameter is not used, pass a NULL there.

\fBNOTE:\fP This function was rewritten for the 7.12.2 release and this

documentation covers the functionality of the new one. The new one is not

feature-complete with the old one, but most of the formats supported by the

new one was supported by the old too.

\fIcurl_getdate(3)\fP returns the number of seconds since the Epoch, January

1st 1970 00:00:00 in the UTC time zone, for the date and time that the

\fIdatestring\fP parameter specifies. The \fInow\fP parameter is not used,

pass a NULL there.

.SH PARSING DATES AND TIMES

A "date" is a string containing several items separated by whitespace. The

order of the items is immaterial.  A date string may contain many flavors of

Having a 64 bit time_t is not a guarantee that dates beyond 03:14:07 UTC,

January 19, 2038 will work fine. On systems with a 64 bit time_t but with a

crippled mktime(), \fIcurl_getdate\fP will return -1 in this case.

.SH REWRITE

The former version of this function was built with yacc and was not only very

large, it was also never quite understood and it wasn't possible to build with

non-GNU tools since only GNU Bison could make it thread-safe!

The rewrite was done for 7.12.2. The new one is much smaller and uses simpler

code.