Locale-aware date parsing

Alexander Netkachev wrote:

Hi!

I'm learning the date formatting and parsing functions in PHP and see
that there are no locale-aware date parsing function (strptime) that is
a pair for strftime.
Are there reasons to not implement it? Is a patch welcome?

Short question: is it available on all our major platforms?

Some info about it is here: http://www.google.com/search?q=strptime
and http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xsh/strptime.html

I couldn't find it on msdn.microsoft.com so i guess their C library
doesn't have it.

We've already had problems with Microsofs strftime() not supporting
all placeholders so i'm against adding it by default. A PECL
extension would be fine though.

PS:

We have talked about including the strftime() implementation of
the BSD C library into the PHP source to get rid of the platform
dependant strftime() inconsistencies. Maybe it is about time to
re-think this, add strptime() to the idea?

--
Hartmut Holzgraefe <hartmut@php.net