How to parse a string to a ctime struct?

Question

Is there an established way to parse a string to a Time structure?

What I would ideally like to do is the reverse of strftime(...), where instead of producing a string from a time struct and format string, I get a time struct from a string parsed according to the provided format string.

I would prefer not to add additional overhead by including a DateTime class such as that found in Boost or .NET

Answer 1

The corresponding method for parsing strings to struct tm * is strptime.

Unfortunately this isn't part of the standard C runtime library and doesn't exist on e.g. windows, but you can reuse a BSD-licensed version, such as this one.