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

[Eike Rathke <erack@sun.com>]

On Wednesday, 2007-03-21 22:19:22 -0500, David A. Wheeler wrote:

> > While speaking of ISO
> > 8601 formats in those functions: ISO specifies an optional 'T' between
> > date an time, to make the string one word for processing, where humans
> > usually write a blank instead. OOo supports the 'T' separator, but no
> > other application seems to. Should we make that a SHOULD? I now did so.
> 
> At least a SHOULD, I think.  Does the ISO standard _require_ supporting the 'T' when separating the date and time?

Yes, it does. ISO 8601:2004 section 4.3.2 "Complete representations" (of
4.3 "Date and time of day") says that the character 'T' shall be used as
a time designator, and adds a note that by mutual agreement of partners
in information interchange the character may be omitted if the
representation is unambiguous.

Since ISO makes you pay (currently 126.00 CHF for ISO 8601) for copies
of standards documents, here are some good public sources:

Here's what ISO's 8601 page says:
http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prods-services/popstds/datesandtime.html

| Date and time represents a specified time of a specified day. When use
| is made of the calendar date the representation is:
| 
| YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss
| 
| where the capital letter T is used to separate the date and time
| components. Thus, for a very precise date and time, look at this:
| 
| Example: 2003-04-01T13:01:02 represents one minute and two seconds after
| one o'clock in the afternoon of 2003-04-01. 


Recommended reading:

http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html
http://www.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/technical/software/SGML/doc/iso8601/ISO8601.html
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/iso8601.html


> We'll need to add tests to check for all this, esp. since we KNOW of implementations that don't do this.

Could you do so before uploading the version of the document I sent you
last night?

  Eike

-- 
Automatic string conversions considered dangerous. They are the GOTO statements
of spreadsheets.  --Robert Weir on the OpenDocument formula subcommittee's list.