Re: Plotting a table of date+time pairs

[Michael Heerdegen <michael_heerdegen@web.de>]

"Fraga, Eric" <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk> writes:

> > But the real problem is that the org table export mechanism thinks that
> > the time field doesn't look like a numerical field, so it wraps every
> > such field in quotes, and the exported data file will look like
> >
> > | 2024-09-18      "11:40 CEST"
> > | 2024-09-19      "11:27 CEST"
>
> Is it possible to specify a format to timecolumn that includes both the
> quotes and the time zone?  I'm thinking something along the lines of
>
>  ... timecolumn(2, "\"%H:%M %Z\"")
>
> (untested)

Tested!

The escaped quotes seem to be recognized literally as expected.  This
saves me from my org hack!

Unfortunately %Z is ignored - I think it's only significant for output:

|  [...] However this default can be replaced when reading any
|  particular file or column of input using the timecolumn function in
|  the corresponding using specifier.
|
|  The conversion to and from seconds assumes Universal Time (which is
|  the same as Greenwich Standard Time). There is no provision for
|  changing the time zone or for daylight savings. If all your data
|  refer to the same time zone (and are all either daylight or standard)
|  you don’t need to worry about these things. But if the absolute time
|  is crucial for your application, you’ll need to convert to UT
|  yourself.

I thought maybe %z, which is meant to support a time zone in [+/-]mm:hh
format, could work, but parsing completely fails when using it.  Maybe
it's not implemented for input, not even as "ignore that part".

But that's not a big deal, I'm happy with the version that works.  You
were a great help, Eric.


Thanks again,

Michael.