Effective String to Date conversion?

[atzensepp via Digitalmars-d-learn]

Dear D-gurus,

being new to D I am trying my first steps and the language is 
quite intuitive and appealing.
When reading a file and creating a hash for the reocrds I want to 
get only the most recent ones. For this I need to convert 
Date/Time-Strings to comparable DateTime-Objects.
The code below works but looks a bit clumsy. Is there a more 
efficient (shorter) way to accomplish this?

Thanks in advance


```d
// Read lines using foreach.
void main( string args[])
{
    auto file = File(args[1]);// Open for reading
    auto range = file.byLineCopy();
    auto iline=0;
    int  idxARE=2,idxDC=3,idxTD=0;

    string [] records[string];

    DateTime getDateTime( string [] row)
    {
        int d,m,y,ho,mi,se;
        row[0].formattedRead!"%d.%d.%d"(d, m, y);
        row[1].formattedRead!"%d:%d:%d"(ho, mi, se);
        return DateTime(y,m,d,ho,mi,se);
    }

    foreach (line; range)
    {
        if (!line.empty)
        {
            string [] row = line.split(";");

            string key = [row[2], row[3]].join("_"); // unique key
            if(iline>0) // skip header line
            {
               if(key in records)
               {
                  // do we have a newer one?
                  if( getDateTime(row) > 
getDateTime(records[key]))
                  {
                     records[key]=row;
                     writeln("UPDATE:",key);
                  }
               } else
               {
                  // first one:
                  records[key]=row;
               }
              }
            iline++;
        }
    }

    writeln( records.length);
    writeln("Lines: ",i);
}

```