Parse ISO 8601 durations

Question

In ISO 8601, durations are given in the format P[n]Y[n]M[n]DT[n]H[n]M[n]S.

Examples:

20 seconds:

PT20.0S

One year, 2 month, 3 days, 4 hours, 5 minutes, 6 seconds:

P1Y2M3DT4H5M6S

Question:

Given a string that contains a duration in iso 8601 format. I want to obtain the overall number of seconds of that duration. What is the recommended way in standard C++11 to achieve this?

Remarks:

E.g., there is ptime from_iso_string(std::string) in boost DateTime which does not fit here. Is there a similar way without doing a regex by hand?

Answer 1

Use the standard regex library, the regex you want is something like:

"P\(\([0-9]+\)Y\)?\(\([0-9]+\)M\)?\(\([0-9]+\)D\)?T\(\([0-9]+\)H\)?\(\([0-9]+\)M\)?\(\([0-9]+\(\.[0-9]+\)?S\)?"

from that you can pull out the number of years, months etc and calculate total seconds.

Answer 2

Example code for ISO 8601 duration to Unix epoch time converter:

#include <iostream>
#include <vector>
#include <regex>

using namespace std;

void match_duration(const std::string& input, const std::regex& re)
{
    std::smatch match;
    std::regex_search(input, match, re);
    if (match.empty()) {
        std::cout << "Pattern do NOT match" << std::endl;
        return;
    }

    std::vector<double> vec = {0,0,0,0,0,0}; // years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds

    for (size_t i = 1; i < match.size(); ++i) {

        if (match[i].matched) {
            std::string str = match[i];
            str.pop_back(); // remove last character.
            vec[i-1] = std::stod(str);
        }
    }

    int duration = 31556926   * vec[0] +  // years  
                   2629743.83 * vec[1] +  // months
                   86400      * vec[2] +  // days
                   3600       * vec[3] +  // hours
                   60         * vec[4] +  // minutes
                   1          * vec[5];   // seconds

    if (duration == 0) {
        std::cout << "Not valid input" << std::endl;
        return;
    }

    std::cout << "duration: " << duration << " [sec.]" << std::endl;
}

int main()
{
    std::cout << "-- ISO 8601 duration to Unix epoch time converter--" << std::endl;
    std::cout << "Enter duration (q for quit)" << std::endl;

    std::string input;
    //input = "P1Y2M3DT4H5M6S";
    //input = "PT4H5M6S";
    //
    while(true)
    {
        std::cin >> input;
        if (!std::cin)
            break;
        if (input == "q")
            break;

        std::regex rshort("^((?!T).)*$");

        if (std::regex_match(input, rshort)) // no T (Time) exist
        {
            std::regex r("P([[:d:]]+Y)?([[:d:]]+M)?([[:d:]]+D)?");
            match_duration(input, r);
        }
        else {

            std::regex r("P([[:d:]]+Y)?([[:d:]]+M)?([[:d:]]+D)?T([[:d:]]+H)?([[:d:]]+M)?([[:d:]]+S|[[:d:]]+\\.[[:d:]]+S)?");
            match_duration(input, r);
        }
    }

    return 0;
  }