Year is out of valid range: 1400...10000

Question

I'm attempting to use boost::date_time to parse a date string (obtained from the Twitter API) into a ptime object. An example of the date format is:

Thu Mar 24 16:12:42 +0000 2011

No matter what I do though, I get a "Year is out of valid range" exception while trying to parse the string. The date format looks correct to me, here is the code:

boost::posix_time::ptime created_time;
std::stringstream ss(created_string);
ss.exceptions(std::ios_base::failbit); //Turn on exceptions
ss.imbue(std::locale(ss.getloc(), new boost::posix_time::time_input_facet("%a %b %d %T %q %Y")));
ss >> created_time;

In the above code "created_string" contains the above date. Have I made a mistake in the format string?

Answer 1

Both %T and %q are output-online format flags.

To demonstrate that, change your format to "%a %b %d %H:%M:%S +0000 %Y" and your program will run as described.

As for time zone input, it is a bit more complex, you may have to pre-process the string to change +0000 to posix time zone format first.

EDIT: for example you could do it this way:

#include <iostream>
#include <sstream>
#include <boost/date_time.hpp>
int main()
{
        //std::string created_string = "Thu Mar 24 16:12:42 +0000 2011";
        // write your own function to search and replace +0000 with GMT+00:00
        std::string created_string = "Thu Mar 24 16:12:42 GMT+00:00 2011";

        boost::local_time::local_date_time created_time(boost::local_time::not_a_date_time);
        std::stringstream ss(created_string);
        ss.exceptions(std::ios_base::failbit);
        ss.imbue(std::locale(ss.getloc(),
                 new boost::local_time::local_time_input_facet("%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %ZP %Y")));
        ss >> created_time;
        std::cout << created_time << '\n';
}