Parse ISO date with older GNU coreutils

Question

I am parsing a date as below:

date +'%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ' -d '2017-10-06T13:41:06Z'

It works fine with date version (GNU coreutils) 8.21 but it is not working for date version (GNU coreutils) 8.4. Giving following error:

date: invalid date `2017-10-06T13:41:06Z'

Is there a way to parse this date in (GNU coreutils) 8.4 ?

@pacholik No, that thread is about parsing a different format. — Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
– Gilles 'SO- stop being evil', Commented Oct 6, 2017 at 8:49
@pacholik Depends. In this case, the set of solutions is very different, so yes. There isn't a single way to parse dates, so there can't be a single question on parsing dates. — Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
– Gilles 'SO- stop being evil', Commented Oct 6, 2017 at 8:53

Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' · Accepted Answer · 2017-10-06 08:49:12Z

2

The feature you're using was added in GNU coreutils 8.13, so if you're using an older version, it isn't available.

Split the time at the T first. That works with older versions.

# Given an ISO date $iso_date with the time in split format HH:MM:SS...
date_part=${iso_date%%T*}
time_part=${iso_date#*T}
date -d "$date_part $time_part"

If you also need to support the condensed format with no punctuation, see a similar question on Unix Stack Exchange.

answered Oct 6, 2017 at 8:49

Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'

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1 Comment

Toby Speight Over a year ago

Given that the shell is Bash, one can simply substitute T with a space: date -d "${iso_date/T/ }"

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