Re: [office-formula] DATEVALUE and TIMEVALUE with full DateTimesupport

["David A. Wheeler" <dwheeler@dwheeler.com>]

Eike Rathke:
> The semantics of DATEVALUE( Text D ) explain that D should be a text
> string in a date format, and for TIMEVALUE( Text T ) T should be in
> a time format. Excel and OOo support a mixed DateTime string for both,
> e.g. "1999-11-22 12:34:56". I think we should require that.
> 
> Additionally, DATEVALUE is supposed to return the integer part of the
> date serial number the text was converted to, and TIMEVALUE the
> fractional part. We do not state that, but should explicitly do so.
> Excel has this behavior. OOo currently returns the full
> integer+fractional number for both functions if a combined DateTime
> string was passed, which I consider wrong. Gnumeric correctly returns
> integer respectively fraction if passed either a Date string or a Time
> string (both functions accept both string formats), but does not seem to
> accept a combined DateTime string.
> Opinions?

100% agree, on all counts.

However, I think there needs to be a way to access the value without the chopping-off behavior.  I believe that everyone's VALUE() implementations already do this; is that correct? That would mean that people who don't want this behavior should use VALUE, i.e., VALUE("1999-11-22 12:34:56") wouldn't chop off some of the information.

The current VALUE documentation doesn't mandate this behavior, though. Presuming there are no objections, can you copy/paste the relevant text into VALUE so that "1999-11-22 12:34:56" will be handled without the chopping-off behavior?

--- David A. Wheeler