Libdate is a date API designed to cover most date related functinality in a sane, easy to use way. It will format, parse, and do basic manipulations on dates. All operations are done on the proleptic Gregorian calendar, and the Julian to transition is not handled.
An instant is a point in time. Immovable, unchanging for eternity, it is anchored in one spot through the microseconds of unix time in the UTC time zone. It is broken up into a local representation, consisting of years, months, days, weekdays, hours, minutes, seconds, and microseconds, with a timezone attached.
A duration is a difference between two instants. It has a fixed magnitude, and is independent of timezones and the oddities of human calendars. It may be added or subtracted from instants of other durations. Durations have a resolution of microseconds. It is signed, and negative durations move instants backwards in time.
A period is another form of differece between two instants. However, a period is a flighty creature, which does not anchor itself to the world of men in any strong way. A year may be 365 or 366 days, according to the whims and vagaries of the local calendar. An hour added to a time may jump ahead by two hours, if it so desires to follow the savings of daylight. These creatures attempt to mold themselves to the irrationalities of man's mind, and eschew the divine ordering of absolute time handed down by the prophets.
A timezone is a named zone, as decreed by the mighty IANA timezone database. It may take the form of a location such as "America/New_York", a well-known abbreviation like "EST", or a special value such as "local" or "", which mean, respectively, the current zone or UTC.
Timezones are pervasive, and no time is manipulated in this API without the awareness of the timezone. As a result, it is useful to know that dates are represeted using IANA zoneinfo database names. These are documented fully here: http://www.iana.org/time-zones
There are two extensions that libdate supports: The empty string represents the UTC timezone, and "local" represents the time zone of the system that the system libdate is running on has been configured to.
In the case of ambiguous timezones -- for example, parsing a date with no time attached, while using API call that does not specify the timezone, libdate will assume UTC dates.
The functionality in libdate can be grouped into three main sections: Parsing, Manipulation, and Formatting.
This covers the set of all types provided by, and used throughout, the API of libdate, including all public fields and types.
This covers parse formatted dates in a manner similar to strptime. There are currently plans for an flexible parse() function, but this has not yet been implemented.
Manipulation covers date and time creation, and transition aware APIs that will work for timezone crossings, daylight savings time, and so on.
This covers date formatting, which is done through strftime-like format strings. There are actually no functions exposed for formatting, as this is done through custom formatters for libstd, however, the format strings used to customize the date output are described here.