C++ Converting a Datetime String to Epoch Cleanly

Question

Is there a C/C++/STL/Boost clean method to convert a date time string to epoch time (in seconds)?

yyyy:mm:dd hh:mm:ss

Answer 1

See: Date/time conversion: string representation to time_t

And: [Boost-users] [date_time] So how come there isn't a to_time_t helper func?

So, apparently something like this should work:

#include <boost/date_time/posix_time/posix_time.hpp>
using namespace boost::posix_time;

std::string ts("2002-01-20 23:59:59");
ptime t(time_from_string(ts));
ptime start(gregorian::date(1970,1,1)); 
time_duration dur = t - start; 
time_t epoch = dur.total_seconds();    

But I don't think it's much cleaner than Rob's suggestion: use sscanf to parse the data into a struct tm and then call mktime.