Parse ISO8601/rfc3339 Date?

[#1]

I have a number of columns of dates in the RFC3339 format:

2011-11-18T10:57:02-07:00

In strftime format, this is %Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z, so the "-07:00" is the time-zone.

How do I parse this in the date#() function? The documentation doesn't mention time zones when loading data, just altering the time zone of an already loaded date.

[johnw · Accepted solution]

Well, I don't think QlikView can do it easily.  But you can break the problem into pieces by pulling the string apart and parsing each bit separately.  Here's one approach that seems to be working.

timestamp(date#(mid('2011-11-18T10:57:02-07:00',1,10),'YYYY-MM-DD')

         +time#(mid('2011-11-18T10:57:02-07:00',12,8),'hh:mm:ss')

             $(=mid('2011-11-18T10:57:02-07:00',20,1))

      interval#(mid('2011-11-18T10:57:02-07:00',21,5),'hh:mm'))

Edit: Or did I get the sign wrong?  Let's see, -7:00 would be 7 hours earlier than UTC, right?  So we actually want to add to get to UTC, right?

timestamp(date#(mid('2011-11-18T10:57:02-07:00',1,10),'YYYY-MM-DD')

         +time#(mid('2011-11-18T10:57:02-07:00',12,8),'hh:mm:ss')

            +if(mid('2011-11-18T10:57:02-07:00',20,1)='+',-1,+1)

     *interval#(mid('2011-11-18T10:57:02-07:00',21,5),'hh:mm'))

[#3]

Thanks, that worked.

Since I have about 10 columns that need the same parsing, I made this into a dollar-expression:

SET parse8601=timestamp(date#(mid($1,1,10),'YYYY-MM-DD')

         +time#(mid($1,12,8),'hh:mm:ss')

            +if(mid($1,20,1)='+',-1,+1)

     *interval#(mid($1,21,5),'hh:mm'));