Thank for the ideas. The 'date' command examples look interesting. I think R would not be too unwieldy as a hammer here. My use case is a humble one: just take a several clock times in HH:MM format (utc) and adjust to another timezone by adding or subtracting the relevant number of hours. The day of week is not important; i will have to deal with it. I did imagine a conditional subtraction by adding of subtracting 24:00 as needed.
Much thanks for the advice. Alan On Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 15:00 Tim Cross <theophil...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Maxim Nikulin <maniku...@gmail.com> writes: > > > 2020-12-12 Alan E. Davis wrote: > >> > >> Thank for the clear explanation. My little problem seems to require a > >> super steam hammer. Your insights are most helpful. > > > > In my opinion, org mode is too rigid in respect to timestamp format. > > Sometimes I would prefer to specify timestamps with timezone. > > > > Well known example of idiosyncrasy of particular applications. > > Timestamps in xls files are represented by floating point numbers, > > namely days since 1 Jan 1900, fractional part is time. Unfortunately > > 1900 is not a leap year, so to avoid unnecessary complications of code > > and keep memory footprint small, on Macs epoch starts in 1904, on > > windows year 1900 has Feb, 29... > > Although there are likely some dark corners where bugs can be found, I > think you could probably add timezone data to org timestamps by changing > the default format strings. Org also uses an 'internal' 'time' value to > represent timestamps which are then converted to the required format > using these format strings. > > What is possibly missing is an easy way to specify a time zone when > creating a timestamp. I suspect it will default to whatever the local > system tz is and I don't think there is any convenient way to change tz > values like there is for the other timestamp components. > > -- > Tim Cross > >
