I attached a patch showing how i am dealing temporally with this
AM/PM issue.

We have rule for iso 8601:
"%Y-%m-%d"

It should be possible to add support for:
"%m/%d/%y"

(similarly as we have several rules for HH:MM:SS)

I guess its natural to support both.

Tino



On Tue, 11 Aug 2015, Nicolas Richard wrote:

> Tino Calancha <f92capac@gmail.com> writes:
>> Maybe  parsing "%c" looks too ambitius for the
>> freedoom of the output format.
>
> Also FWIW, parse-time-string won't parse (format-time-string "%c"
> (current-time)) correctly in many non-english locales because it won't
> recognize the month names.
>
> In my french setup:
> (format-time-string "%c" (current-time)) => "mar. 11 août 2015 07:34:35 CEST"
>
> "mar" stands for "mardi" (= Tuesday), but will be understood as "March" :
> (parse-time-string "mar. 11 août 2015 07:34:35 CEST") => (35 34 7 11 3 2015 nil nil nil)
>
>> We may need something like:
>>
>> once you find "am" "pm" look the token: "HH:MM:SS" and ask:
>>
>> when "pm" and HH < 12: HH ---> HH + 12
>
> Currently parse-time-string works with rules (they are found in
> parse-time-rules), each setting one element of a (SEC MIN HOUR DAY MON
> YEAR DOW DST TZ) list. When one such element is set, parse-time-string
> won't modify it anymore. So we need a small change in the design here if
> we want to take PM into account.
>
> -- 
> Nico
>