ISO-8601 Time Parsing

[Dave_Thomson]

A number of people, myself included, have found it necessary to parse ISO-8601 time strings into time values. The ISO standard has a lot of options, so a complete solution is pretty time-consuming. It would be nice if the string parsing functions in LabVIEW included a format specifier that allowed parsing of ISO-8601 time strings directly.

[fefepeto_kb]

This effort might be a good candidate for crowdsourcing. Creating a pair of VIs that work out of a format specifier enum, then other options can be added as parameters, like the use of a specific decimal separator, etc.

[crossrulz]

I'm also of the opinion that this would be better for something the community takes on. My initial thought was a series of constants for the desired formats, but a VI with an enum input would be a lot better.

[wiebe@CARYA]

Ideally though (as mentioned in the idea) ISO-8601 support should (also) be added to:

• Format Into String
• Format Value
• Format Date\Time String
• Scan From String
• Scan Value
• Control\Indicator Format Specifiers

That's something NI needs to do (optionally based on community effort).

[PhillipBrooks]

There is a github repo with quite a few time conversion functions:

https://github.com/LabVIEW-Open-Source/Epoch-Time

Also installable via VIPM - seach for Epoch

[drjdpowell]

I would suggest supporting RFC3339 rather than the larger task of fully supporting ISO-8601.

[wiebe@CARYA]

From what I'm reading at least one library with (some?) time related ISO parsing support is already available.

So are we asking to bring such a library in LabVIEW? (JSONtext style?)

Or (also?) for support of time parsing by the native functions?

[drjdpowell]

Note: my RFC3339 support functions are based on the existing timestamp formating codes, but they require multiple workarounds, especially to support local offset forms like 2025-07-07T17:12:13.123+01:00.