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Is there any function that converts a Month, Day, Year combination (e.g., "March 21, 2009"), to FILETIME? I don't mind doing it manually using a SYSTEMTIME, but anything Windows provides will be better than what I do. Thanks for any info.

  • Parsing this (which is a result) is a bit too late (especially with localized Windows). How did you get that string in the first place? That probably was a PROPVARIANT initially. – Simon Mourier Jan 17 '20 at 19:06
  • Well I'll be regexing it from a standard Outlook pdf email header, which is formatted using a long date. Actually I can probably regex for just the month, date, and year (and leave out the day of the week). But I still wasn't sure if there was a function to get that to a FILETIME. I assume I'll have to do it manually, which is fine. –  Jan 17 '20 at 19:13
  • So, it's not coming from the Windows Property System, is it? If it's not, then it's not necessarily a PDFF_LONGDATE per se. – Simon Mourier Jan 17 '20 at 19:16
  • Oh, yeah, then I guess I should rephrase the question. –  Jan 17 '20 at 19:17
  • You seem to be going the wrong direction. If you want data to be machine-readable, don't make it human-readable along the way. Parsing `March` is inherently harder than parsing `03`. I'm almost sure that you started out with a `FILETIME`. Keep that, and you won't have to apply a (lossy) conversion later on. – IInspectable Jan 17 '20 at 20:28
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    There are a few ways in Windows to do string->date conversion, see https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20121102-00/?p=6183. – Jonathan Potter Jan 17 '20 at 20:28
  • @Jonathan Potter - Thank you very much. Not sure how I missed those. –  Jan 17 '20 at 21:36
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    @loop123123 you should always remember to check the official documentation, a.k.a. Raymond's blog ;) – Jonathan Potter Jan 17 '20 at 22:01
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    Yes definitely. If you want to make your comment an answer, I'll mark it as accepted. –  Jan 18 '20 at 00:08

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