I would like to see if at 00:00:00 on January 1, 1970 it actually corresponds to 0 seconds, and I wrote the following:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <time.h>
int main(void) {
int year = 1970;
struct tm t = {0};
t.tm_mday = 1; // January
t.tm_year = year - 1900;
t.tm_hour = 0;
t.tm_isdst = -1;
printf("%ld\n", mktime(&t));
return 0;
}
it gives me a value of -3600. Where am I wrong?
PS: tested with GCC v.10.1. I tried with another compiler under another architecture and it gives me back the correct value.
The time info you provide to mktime() is in local time, so the timezone matters even if summer time / daylight savings time does not.
You can fool your program by telling it you're in UTC:
$ gcc mytime.c -o mytime
$ ./mytime
28800 <-- Pacific time in the US
$ TZ=GMT0 ./mytime
0
The mktime function takes a time in local time. Apparently, 00:00:00 at your local time was one hour before the epoch. Launch the program with TZ set to UTC.
I would like to see if at 00:00:00 on January 1, 1970 it actually corresponds to 0 seconds, and I wrote the following:
00:00:00 on January 1, 1970 GMT, UTC corresponds to 0 seconds.
00:00:00 on January 1, 1970 Italia time corresponds to -3600 seconds.
Set timezone to UTC and then call mktime(). Unfortunately C does not have a portable way to do this, so the suggested code is only illustrative.
setenv("TZ", "UTC", 1);
tzset();
....
mktime(&t)
time_t does not necessarily match long. Recommend casting to a wide type.
// printf("%ld\n", mktime(&t));
printf("%lld\n", (long long) mktime(&t));
t.tm_mday = 1; // January misleads. .tm_mday is the day of the month, not January.
.tm_mon is the months since January so the initialization to 0 matches January.
Concerns about DST apply here only if the local time was using DST in January.
As other answers indicate, mktime works in your local time zone. However, many operating systems offer a related function timegm that works in UTC. This slight modification of your program prints 0, as expected, on my computer:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <time.h>
int main(void)
{
int year = 1970;
struct tm t = {0};
t.tm_mday = 1; // January
t.tm_year = year - 1900;
t.tm_hour = 0;
t.tm_isdst = -1;
printf("%ld\n", timegm(&t));
return 0;
}
Regrettably, this function is not standardized. You may have to define a special "feature selection macro" to get your time.h to declare it.
Related
I need the functionality for a user to enter a timestamp, store that timestamp on the disk, then display that timestamp at a later time. I also need to be able to determine the distance between two timestamps.
My current solution is to use the time.h utility as follows:
To read a given timestamp of the form "MO/DA/YEAR HR:MI"
time_t readable_to_epoch(char* str) {
int mo, da, yr, hr, mi;
sscanf(str, "%d/%d/%d %d:%d", &mo, &da, &yr, &hr, &mi);
struct tm timeinfo;
time_t out;
timeinfo.tm_mon = mo - 1;
timeinfo.tm_mday = da;
timeinfo.tm_year = yr - 1900;
timeinfo.tm_hour = hr;
timeinfo.tm_min = mi;
timeinfo.tm_sec = 0;
out = mktime(&timeinfo);
return out;
}
To convert a given time_t into a human readable form:
// WARNING returned string must be freed;
char* epoch_to_readable(time_t time) {
return asctime(localtime(&time));
}
My issue is that if I pass in the input:
06/19/2018 12:52
The conversion to time_t and back is as desired. Here is the test harness output:
original: 06/19/2018 12:52
epoch time: 1529437920
converted readable: Tue Jun 19 12:52:00 2018
But when I pass in the input:
01/01/2022 10:00
The converted readable seems to be one hour behind:
original: 01/01/2022 10:00
epoch time: 1641056400
converted readable: Sat Jan 1 09:00:00 2022
I have no idea why this is happening, and google isn't helping. What do I need to do to fix this?
You did not set timeinfo.tm_isdst, so you're getting undefined behaviour. You should use -1.
Daylight Saving Time flag. The value is positive if DST is in effect, zero if not and negative if no information is available
Note that working with local times without offset is inherently buggy. Because of Daylight Saving Time, time stamps from two hours each year are indistinguishable from each other.
I didn't find a trivial way to get the time offset in minutes between the local time and the UTC time.
At first I intended to use tzset() but it doesn't provide the daylight saving time. According to the man page, it is simply an integer different of zero if day light saving is in effect. While it is usually an hour, it may be half an hour in some country.
I would prefer avoiding to compute the time difference between current UTC returned by gmtime() and localtime().
A more general solution would give me this information for a specified location and a positive time_t value, or at least locally.
Edit 1: the use case is to get the right local time offset for https://github.com/chmike/timez.
BTW, If you thought libc functions to manipulate time were Ok, read this https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2013/03/17/time/.
Edit 2: the best and simplest solution I have so far to compute the time offset to UTC in minutes is
// Bogus: assumes DST is always one hour
tzset();
int offset = (int)(-timezone / 60 + (daylight ? 60 : 0));
The problem is to determine the real day light saving time.
Edit 3: Inspired by the answer of #trenki, I came up with the following solution. This is a hack in that it tricks mktime() to consider the output of gmtime() as the localtime. The result is inaccurate when the DST change is in the time span between UTC time and localtime.
#include <stdio.h>
#include <time.h>
int main()
{
time_t rawtime = time(NULL);
struct tm *ptm = gmtime(&rawtime);
// Request that mktime() looksup dst in timezone database
ptm->tm_isdst = -1;
time_t gmt = mktime(ptm);
double offset = difftime(rawtime, gmt) / 60;
printf("%f\n", offset);
return 0;
}
This C code computes the local time offset in minutes relative to UTC. It assumes that DST is always one hour offset.
#include <stdio.h>
#include <time.h>
int main()
{
time_t rawtime = time(NULL);
struct tm *ptm = gmtime(&rawtime);
time_t gmt = mktime(ptm);
ptm = localtime(&rawtime);
time_t offset = rawtime - gmt + (ptm->tm_isdst ? 3600 : 0);
printf("%i\n", (int)offset);
}
It uses gmtime and localtime though. Why don't you want to use those functions?
Does your system's strftime() function support the %z and %Z specifiers? On FreeBSD,
%Z is replaced by the time zone name.
%z is replaced by the time zone offset from UTC; a leading plus sign
stands for east of UTC, a minus sign for west of UTC, hours and
minutes follow with two digits each and no delimiter between them
(common form for RFC 822 date headers).
and I can use this to print this:
$ date +"%Z: %z"
CEST: +0200
ISO C99 has this in 7.23.3.5 The strftime function:
%z is replaced by the offset from UTC in the ISO 8601 format
‘‘−0430’’ (meaning 4 hours 30 minutes behind UTC, west of Greenwich),
or by no characters if no time zone is determinable. [tm_isdst]
%Z is replaced by the locale’s time zone name or abbreviation, or by no
characters if no time zone is determinable. [tm_isdst]
... to get local time offset ... relative to UTC?
#Serge Ballesta answer is good. So I though I would test it and clean-up a few details. I would have posted as a comment but obviously too big for that. I only exercised it for my timezone, but though others may want to try on their machine and zone.
I made to community wiki as not to garner rep. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery
This answer is akin to #trenki except that it subtracts nearby struct tm values instead of assuming DST shift is 1 hour and time_t is in seconds.
#include <limits.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <time.h>
// return difference in **seconds** of the tm_mday, tm_hour, tm_min, tm_sec members.
long tz_offset_second(time_t t) {
struct tm local = *localtime(&t);
struct tm utc = *gmtime(&t);
long diff = ((local.tm_hour - utc.tm_hour) * 60 + (local.tm_min - utc.tm_min))
* 60L + (local.tm_sec - utc.tm_sec);
int delta_day = local.tm_mday - utc.tm_mday;
// If |delta_day| > 1, then end-of-month wrap
if ((delta_day == 1) || (delta_day < -1)) {
diff += 24L * 60 * 60;
} else if ((delta_day == -1) || (delta_day > 1)) {
diff -= 24L * 60 * 60;
}
return diff;
}
void testtz(void) {
long off = -1;
int delta = 600;
for (time_t t = 0; t < LONG_MAX-delta; t+=delta) {
long off2 = tz_offset_second(t);
// Print time whenever offset changes.
if (off != off2) {
struct tm utc = *gmtime(&t);
printf("%10jd %04d-%02d-%02dT%02d:%02d:%02dZ\n", (intmax_t) t,
utc.tm_year + 1900, utc.tm_mon + 1, utc.tm_mday,
utc.tm_hour, utc.tm_min, utc.tm_sec);
struct tm local = *localtime(&t);
off = off2;
printf("%10s %04d-%02d-%02d %02d:%02d:%02d %2d %6ld\n\n", "",
local.tm_year + 1900, local.tm_mon + 1, local.tm_mday,
local.tm_hour, local.tm_min, local.tm_sec, local.tm_isdst ,off);
fflush(stdout);
}
}
puts("Done");
}
Output
v----v Difference in seconds
0 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z
1969-12-31 18:00:00 0 -21600
5731200 1970-03-08T08:00:00Z
1970-03-08 03:00:00 1 -18000
26290800 1970-11-01T07:00:00Z
1970-11-01 01:00:00 0 -21600
...
2109222000 2036-11-02T07:00:00Z
2036-11-02 01:00:00 0 -21600
2120112000 2037-03-08T08:00:00Z
2037-03-08 03:00:00 1 -18000
2140671600 2037-11-01T07:00:00Z
2037-11-01 01:00:00 0 -21600
Done
IMHO the only foolproof and portable way is to use localtime and gmtime and manually compute the delta in minute because those 2 functions exist on all known systems. For example:
int deltam() {
time_t t = time(NULL);
struct tm *loc = localtime(&t);
/* save values because they could be erased by the call to gmtime */
int loc_min = loc->tm_min;
int loc_hour = loc->tm_hour;
int loc_day = loc->tm_mday;
struct tm *utc = gmtime(&t);
int delta = loc_min - utc->tm_min;
int deltaj = loc_day - utc->tm_mday;
delta += (loc_hour - utc->tm_hour) * 60;
/* hack for the day because the difference actually is only 0, 1 or -1 */
if ((deltaj == 1) || (deltaj < -1)) {
delta += 1440;
}
else if ((deltaj == -1) || (deltaj > 1)) {
delta -= 1440;
}
return delta;
}
Beware, I did not test all possible corner cases, but it could be a starting point for your requirement.
I would like to submit yet another answer to this question, one that AFAICS also deals with the IDL.
This solution depends on timegm and mktime. On Windows timegm is available as _mkgmtime from the CRT, in other words define a conditional macro.
#if _WIN32
# define timegm _mkgmtime
#endif
int local_utc_offset_minutes ( ) {
time_t t = time ( NULL );
struct tm * locg = localtime ( &t );
struct tm locl;
memcpy ( &locl, locg, sizeof ( struct tm ) );
return (int)( timegm ( locg ) - mktime ( &locl ) ) / 60;
}
Here is my way:
time_t z = 0;
struct tm * pdt = gmtime(&z);
time_t tzlag = mktime(pdt);
Alternative with automatic, local storage of struct tm:
struct tm dt;
memset(&dt, 0, sizeof(struct tm));
dt.tm_mday=1; dt.tm_year=70;
time_t tzlag = mktime(&dt);
tzlag, in seconds, will be the negative of the UTC offset; lag of your timezone Standard Time compared to UTC:
LocalST + tzlag = UTC
If you want to also account for "Daylight savings", subtract tm_isdst from tzlag, where tm_isdst is the field for a particular local time struct tm, after applying mktime to it (or after obtaining it with localtime ).
Why it works:
The set struct tm is for "epoch" moment, Jan 1 1970, which corresponds to a time_t of 0.
Calling mktime() on that date converts it to time_t as if it were UTC (thus getting 0), then subtracts the UTC offset from it in order to produce the output time_t. Thus it produces negative of UTC_offset.
I'm using the standard mktime function to turn a struct tm into an epoch time value. The tm fields are populated locally, and I need to get the epoch time as GMT. tm has a gmtoff field to allow you to set the local GMT offset in seconds for just this purpose.
But I can't figure out how to get that information. Surely there must be a standard function somewhere that will return the offset? How does localtime do it?
Just do the following:
#define _GNU_SOURCE /* for tm_gmtoff and tm_zone */
#include <stdio.h>
#include <time.h>
/* Checking errors returned by system calls was omitted for the sake of readability. */
int main(void)
{
time_t t = time(NULL);
struct tm lt = {0};
localtime_r(&t, <);
printf("Offset to GMT is %lds.\n", lt.tm_gmtoff);
printf("The time zone is '%s'.\n", lt.tm_zone);
return 0;
}
Note: The seconds since epoch returned by time() are measured as if in Greenwich.
How does localtime do it?
According to localtime man page
The localtime() function acts as if it called tzset(3) and sets the
external variables tzname with information about the current timezone,
timezone with the difference between Coordinated Universal
Time (UTC) and local standard time in seconds
So you could either call localtime() and you will have the difference in timezone or call tzset():
extern long timezone;
....
tzset();
printf("%ld\n", timezone);
Note: if you choose to go with localtime_r() note that it is not required to set those variables you will need to call tzset() first to set timezone:
According to POSIX.1-2004, localtime() is required to behave as though
tzset() was called, while localtime_r() does not have this
requirement. For portable code tzset() should be called before
localtime_r()
The universal version of obtaining local time offset function is here.
I borrowed pieces of code from this answer in stackoverflow.
int time_offset()
{
time_t gmt, rawtime = time(NULL);
struct tm *ptm;
#if !defined(WIN32)
struct tm gbuf;
ptm = gmtime_r(&rawtime, &gbuf);
#else
ptm = gmtime(&rawtime);
#endif
// Request that mktime() looksup dst in timezone database
ptm->tm_isdst = -1;
gmt = mktime(ptm);
return (int)difftime(rawtime, gmt);
}
I guess I should have done a bit more searching before asking. It turns out there's a little known timegm function which does the opposite of gmtime. It's supported on GNU and BSD which is good enough for my purposes. A more portable solution is to temporarily set the value of the TZ environment variable to "UTC" and then use mktime, then set TZ back.
But timegm works for me.
This is the portable solution that should work on all standard C (and C++) platforms:
const std::time_t epoch_plus_11h = 60 * 60 * 11;
const int local_time = localtime(&epoch_plus_11h)->tm_hour;
const int gm_time = gmtime(&epoch_plus_11h)->tm_hour;
const int tz_diff = local_time - gm_time;
Add std:: namespace when using C++. The result is in hours in the range [-11, 12];
Explanation:
We just convert the date-time "1970-01-01 11:00:00" to tm structure twice - with the local timezone and with the GMT. The result is the difference between hours part.
The "11:00::00" has been chosen because this is the only time point (considering GMT) when we have the same date in the whole globe. Because of that fact, we don't have to consider the additional magic with date changing in the calculations.
WARNING
Previous version of my answer worked only on linux:
// DO NOT DO THAT!!
int timezonez_diff = localtime(&epoch_plus_11h)->tm_hour -
gmtime(&epoch_plus_11h)->tm_hour;
This may not work because the storage for result tm object returned as a pointer from localtime and gmtime may be shared (and it is on windows/msvc). That's whe I've introduced temporaries for calculation.
I believe the following is true in linux at least: timezone info comes from /usr/share/zoneinfo/. localtime reads /etc/localtime which should be a copy of the appropriate file from zoneinfo. You can see whats inside by doing zdump -v on the timezone file (zdump may be in sbin but you don't need elevated permissions to read timezone files with it). Here is a snipped of one:
/usr/share/zoneinfo/EST5EDT Sun Nov 6 05:59:59 2033 UTC = Sun Nov 6 01:59:59 2033 EDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-14400
/usr/share/zoneinfo/EST5EDT Sun Nov 6 06:00:00 2033 UTC = Sun Nov 6 01:00:00 2033 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=-18000
/usr/share/zoneinfo/EST5EDT Sun Mar 12 06:59:59 2034 UTC = Sun Mar 12 01:59:59 2034 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=-18000
/usr/share/zoneinfo/EST5EDT Sun Mar 12 07:00:00 2034 UTC = Sun Mar 12 03:00:00 2034 EDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-14400
/usr/share/zoneinfo/EST5EDT Sun Nov 5 05:59:59 2034 UTC = Sun Nov 5 01:59:59 2034 EDT
I guess you could parse this yourself if you want. I'm not sure if there is a stdlib function that just returns the gmtoff (there may well be but I don't know...)
edit: man tzfile describes the format of the zoneinfo file. You should be able to simply mmap into a structure of the appropriate type. It appears to be what zdump is doing based on an strace of it.
Here's a two-liner inspired by #Hill's and #friedo's answers:
#include <time.h>
...
time_t rawtime = time(0);
timeofs = timegm(localtime(&rawtime)) - rawtime;
Returns offset from UTC in seconds.
Doesn't need _GNU_SOURCE defined, but note that timegm is not a POSIX standard and may not be available outside of GNU and BSD.
Ended up with this. Sure tm_secs is redundant, just for a sake of consistency.
int timezone_offset() {
time_t zero = 0;
const tm* lt = localtime( &zero );
int unaligned = lt->tm_sec + ( lt->tm_min + ( lt->tm_hour * 60 ) ) * 60;
return lt->tm_mon ? unaligned - 24*60*60 : unaligned;
}
Here is my way:
time_t z = 0;
struct tm * pdt = gmtime(&z);
time_t tzlag = mktime(pdt);
Alternative with automatic, local storage of struct tm:
struct tm dt;
memset(&dt, 0, sizeof(struct tm));
dt.tm_mday=1; dt.tm_year=70;
time_t tzlag = mktime(&dt);
tzlag, in seconds, will be the negative of the UTC offset; lag of your timezone Standard Time compared to UTC:
LocalST + tzlag = UTC
If you want to also account for "Daylight savings", subtract tm_isdst from tzlag, where tm_isdst is for a particular local time struct tm, after applying mktime to it (or after obtaining it with localtime ).
Why it works:
The set struct tm is for "epoch" moment, Jan 1 1970, which corresponds to a time_t of 0.
Calling mktime() on that date converts it to time_t as if it were UTC (thus getting 0), then subtracts the UTC offset from it in order to produce the output time_t. Thus it produces negative of UTC_offset.
Here is one threadsafe way taken from my answer to this post:
What is the correct way to get beginning of the day in UTC / GMT?
::time_t GetTimeZoneOffset ()
{ // This method is to be called only once per execution
static const seconds = 0; // any arbitrary value works!
::tm tmGMT = {}, tmLocal = {};
::gmtime_r(&seconds, &tmGMT); // ::gmtime_s() for WINDOWS
::localtime_r(&seconds, &tmLocal); // ::localtime_s() for WINDOWS
return ::mktime(&tmGMT) - ::mktime(&tmLocal);
};
I'm trying to get the UTC time from a localtime. Vice versa it works OK. I only have problems when I want to convert a localtime to a UTC one in order to update an RTC clock. This is what I'm doing:
Say that t is a local timestamp.
char *tz = "GMT-2GMT,M3.5.0/3,M10.5.0/4";
t = 1311444000; // 23/07/11 18:00:00
set_TZ(tz);
gmt_time = gmtime(&t);
mktime(gmt_time);
printf("GMT Time: %s\r\n",asctime (gmt_time));
This gives me 18:00:00, when it should be minus the timezone.
How do I fix this problem?
The problem here is that time_t is supposed to represent the number of seconds (simplification, see footnote) since the epoch. This is not affected by time zones. If you add a time zone offset to a time_t, none of the functions will work as expected. Part of the problem is that it is sometimes impossible to know how to correctly convert such a value to a POSIX timestamp -- when the clocks roll back in the fall, where I live the clocks will read 1:30 AM twice during the same day, and without more information you can't figure out what the UTC time is.
You'll need to convert to local calendar time before you can convert to a POSIX timestamp, at which point you can convert to UTC calendar time.
// NOTE: not reentrant
time_t local_to_posix(time_t t) {
struct tm *tm;
time_t tt;
tm = gmtime(&t); // No timezone compensation
tm->tm_isdst = -1; // Let mktime figure out daylight savings
// NOTE: this WILL be wrong for one hour each year
tt = mktime(tm); // Converts local time to POSIX timestamp
return tt;
}
You can then pass the result to gmtime, which will give you the UTC calendar time.
Footnote: Strictly speaking, these timestamps are not UTC and do not measure the number of seconds since epoch. They are POSIX timestamps, which count seconds since epoch as if there were no leap seconds. This is probably irrelevant unless your realtime clock is an atomic clock.
After further tests the following code this seems to work. Im in UTC+2 and currently in DST. The returned time for UTC is correct. I will to further test without DST and see what is returned.
struct tm tm;
struct tm *local_time;
char *tz = "GMT-2GMT,M3.5.0/3,M10.5.0/4";
time_t t;
tm.tm_hour = 18;
tm.tm_min = 0;
tm.tm_sec = 0;
tm.tm_wday = 0;
tm.tm_yday = 0;
tm.tm_year = (2011) - 1900;
tm.tm_mday = 22;
tm.tm_mon = 7 - 1;
tm.tm_isdst = -1;
set_TZ(tz);
t = mktime(&tm);
local_time = localtime(&t);
printf("Local Time: %s\r\n",asctime (local_time ));
local_time = gmtime(&t);
printf("UTC Time: %s\r\n",asctime (local_time ));
Output:
Local Time: Fri Jul 22 18:00:00 2011
UTC Time: Fri Jul 22 15:00:00 2011
I have a system where I am provided with date and time in the form of a string, for example "2011-03-13 03:05:00". I may receive this string at "2011-03-13 01:59:00" and I need to know the length of time between now and the time in the string (6 minutes due to DST change).
I have code that parses the string and creates a tm struct which is then converted to a time_t with mktime. The problem is that I have to set the tm_isdst flag manually when I parse the time and so I'm looking for a way to detect whether tm_isdst should be set. Any ideas?
I have some ideas for how to deal with the case where there are 2, 2AMs that would be specific to my application, but I still need a way to say "If this time was the current system time, would DST be in effect?"
Edit: Idea based on Pete's suggestion. What if I:
Check if the time received and current system time have a different hour:
If same hour but in the past, add an hour to current time and see if DST flag changed. (If same hour and in future, assume same DST flag as current time (this is most of the year))
If different hour, we add 1 hour to current system time and see if DST flag changed
Thoughts?
According to man mktime (on Linux, emphasis mine):
The value specified in the tm_isdst
field informs mktime() whether or not
daylight saving time (DST) is in
effect for the time supplied in the tm
structure: a positive value means DST
is in effect; zero means that DST is
not in effect; and a negative value
means that mktime() should (use
timezone information and system
databases to) attempt to determine
whether DST is in effect at the
specified time.
Have you tried that?
(It's "attempt to determine" because some times are fundamentally ambiguous.)
Something you could try for the truly ambiguous times is to see if mktime "corrects" your dst flag or not. I'd wager this is non-portable though. Example code, transition set on 31/10/2010, 3am rolls back to 2am in my timezone (Europe/Paris):
#include <time.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
void printit(int hour, int isdst)
{
struct tm when;
memset(&when, 0, sizeof(when));
when.tm_sec = 0;
when.tm_min = 30;
when.tm_hour = hour;
when.tm_mday = 31;
when.tm_mon = 9;
when.tm_year = 110;
when.tm_isdst = isdst;
time_t secs = mktime(&when);
fprintf(stdout, "%2d %ld %d %s", isdst, secs, when.tm_isdst, asctime(&when));
}
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
for (int i=1; i<4; i++) {
fprintf(stdout, "At %dam\n", i);
printit(i, 1);
printit(i, 0);
printit(i, -1);
}
}
Output is:
At 1am
1 1288481400 1 Sun Oct 31 01:30:00 2010
0 1288485000 1 Sun Oct 31 02:30:00 2010
-1 1288481400 1 Sun Oct 31 01:30:00 2010
At 2am
1 1288485000 1 Sun Oct 31 02:30:00 2010
0 1288488600 0 Sun Oct 31 02:30:00 2010
-1 1288488600 0 Sun Oct 31 02:30:00 2010
At 3am
1 1288488600 0 Sun Oct 31 02:30:00 2010
0 1288492200 0 Sun Oct 31 03:30:00 2010
-1 1288492200 0 Sun Oct 31 03:30:00 2010
As you can see, when the time is non-ambiguous, mktime corrects it by setting the right tm_isdst and offsetting the time.
When it is ambiguous, tm_isdst is not changed.
Count on me always for the brute-force way. This might work:
completely parse the time string and put it into a tm structure
call mktime( ) to get a time_t val on that tm struct
add 6 minutes to that new time_t val (using what value for 6 minutes?)
call asctime( ) or similar to get a tm struct (i.e., a "broken-down time") from that time_t val
in this tm struct you just got back from asctime( ), what does tm_isdst tell you ?
-- Pete
Yes, you are right: the whole mess around time is very badly (even maliciously, one at times believes) designed to trip up programmers and to provide perfect closed-book quiz questions for your whoreson lazy / pedantic / idiotic CS instructors.
I have the same question as you, I don't know whether this solution can fix it?
struct tm *local_tm;
time_t t;
t = time(NULL);
local_tm = localtime(&t);
local_tm->tm_year = 2012-1900;
local_tm->tm_mon = 9 - 1;
local_tm->tm_mday = 13;
time_t utc_time = mktime(local_tm);
I think if it you get tm from the system, the tm_isdst field is already set, so the things left is change other fields except tm_isdst, I am not sure whether it is right, but I will try it, if it works for me,I will give further feedback.