Parsedate converts many common time specifications into the number of seconds since the epoch — i.e., a
time_t; see time(2).
Parsedate returns the time, or -1 on error. Text is a character string containing the time and date.
Now is a pointer to the time that should be used for calculating relative dates. If now is NULL, then
GetTimeInfoinlibinn(3) is used to obtain the current time and timezone.
The character string consists of zero or more specifications of the following form:
time A time of day, which is of the form hh[:mm[:ss]] [meridian] [zone] or hhmm [meridian] [zone]. If
no meridian is specified, hh is interpreted on a 24-hour clock.
date A specific month and day with optional year. The acceptable formats are mm/dd[/yy], yyyy/mm/dd,
monthnamedd[, yy], ddmonthname [yy], and day,ddmonthnameyy. The default year is the current
year. If the year is less then 100, then 1900 is added to it; if it is less then 21, then 2000 is
added to it.
relativetime
A specification relative to the current time. The format is numberunit; acceptable units are
year, month, week, day, hour, minute (or min), and second (or sec). The unit can be specified as
a singular or plural, as in 3weeks.
The actual date is calculated according to the following steps. First, any absolute date and/or time is
processed and converted. Using that time as the base, day-of-week specifications are added. Next,
relative specifications are used. If a date or day is specified, and no absolute or relative time is
given, midnight is used. Finally, a correction is applied so that the correct hour of the day is
produced after allowing for daylight savings time differences.
Parsedate ignores case when parsing all words; unknown words are taken to be unknown timezones, which are
treated as GMT. The names of the months and days of the week can be abbreviated to their first three
letters, with optional trailing period. Periods are ignored in any timezone or meridian values.