Hi Lars,

Thanks for your response! I've done some research, and the formats I have
seen all have their rigid formats (with a fixed length in particular)
[1][2][3]. Would you mind pointing me to some exceptions? I can try to
accommodate.

That said, I'd argue it is still useful. It is much shorter, is flexible
and customizable, and uses lisp sexprs instead of a DSL. Please feel free
to let me know what it lacks of, I will try to work on it and present a
final result. =)

Cheers,
Jin

[1]
https://common-lisp.net/project/local-time/manual.html#Parsing-and-Formatting
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
[3]
https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/spss-statistics/23.0.0?topic=formats-date-time

On Sat, Jul 24, 2021 at 7:12 AM Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> wrote:

> "Guu, Jin-Cheng" <jcguu95@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > Currently, the built-in time parsing functions only allow us to parse
> > timestrings with respect to some given formats (ISO-8601, RFC-822)
> > [1]. I have a parsing function that allows users to parse with
> > customized formats which are easy to write. The end result is:
> >
> > ``` emacs-lisp
> > (my/parse-time "20200718-201504"
> >                '((:year 4) (:month 2) (:day 2) "-"
> >                  (:hour 2) (:minute 2) (:second 2)))
> > ;; => ((:second . 4) (:minute . 15) (:hour . 20)
> > ;;     (:day . 18) (:month . 7) (:year . 2020))
> > ```
>
> It's an interesting approach, but in my experience (having written
> parsers for probably more than a hundred different time formats), this
> doesn't really get you very far -- the formats often vary in length, use
> month names, and so on, so you end up having to write tiny functions for
> every format.
>
> So I'm not sure having something like this in Emacs would help that much.
>
> --
> (domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
>    bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no
>