For a few hours yesterday, I felt as if I was taking crazy pills. Then again, I was dealing with time in C

Saturday, August 17, 2024

Over the past year or two, I've been cleaning up my posts here. Largely making sure the HTML is valid, but also that all internal links (links where I link to previous posts) are valid to cut down on needless redirects or “404 Not Found” responses, in addition to fixing errors with my web server configuration. So along those lines, yesterday, I thought it might be time to add conditional responses to mod_blog. Given that it's mostly autonomous web crawling agents that read my site, I might as well tell them that most of the links here haven't changed since the last time they came by.

There are two headers involved with this—Last-Modified and If-Modified-Since. The server sends a Last-Modified header with the last modification date of the resource in question. The client can then send in a If-Modified-Since header with this date, and if the resource hasn't changed, then the server can send back a “304 Not Modified” response, saving a lot of bandwidth. So all I had to do was generate a Last-Modified header (easy, as I already read that information) and then deal with the If-Modified-Since header.

And then I spent way too much time dealing with time in C, which is odd, because there were only fix functions I was dealing with:

time_t time(time_t *tp): This returns the “calendar date and time” in a scalar value. On POSIX, this is an integer value of the number of seconds since midnight, January 1^st, 1970 UTC. The tp paramter is optional.
time_t mktime(struct tm *tm): This converts a structure containing the year, month, day, hour, minute and second into a scalar value. The C standard does not mention time zones at all; POSIX does.
struct tm *gmtime(time_t const *tp): This converts the “calendar date and time” scalar value pointed to by tp into a broken down structure that reflects time in UTC.
struct tm *localtime(time_t const *tp): This converts the “calendar data and time” scalar value pointed to by tp into a brown down structure that reflects the time local to the server.
size_t strftime(char *s,size_t smax,char const *format,struct tm const *tp): This will convert the tp structure into a string based on the format string.
char *strptime(char const *s,char const *format,struct tm *tp): This will parse a string that contains a date, per the given format and return the data into a structure.

All but the last are standard C functions. The last one, strptime() is mandated by POSIX. That's okay, because I'm working on a POSIX system.

It turns out, strptime() is not an easy function to use. Oh, it may look easy, but there are some subtleties that left me dazed and confused for hours yesterday.

The following does not work:

struct tm tm;
time_t    t;

strptime("Fri, 20 May 2005 02:23:22 EDT","%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %Z",&tm);
t = mktime(&tm);

When I was running this code in mod_blog, the resulting times would come back four or five hours off. When I wrote some standalone test code, it would sometimes be correct, sometimes it would be an hour off.

It got to the point where I totally lost the plot of what I was even trying to do.

Now with yesterday behind me, I finally figured out what I was doing wrong.

The POSIX specification states:

It is unspecified whether multiple calls to strptime() using the same tm structure will update the current contents of the structure or overwrite all contents of the structure. Conforming applications should make a single call to strptime() with a format and all data needed to completely specify the date and time being converted.

strptime

This text is near the bottom of the page, and really understates the issue in my opinion.

The Linux man pages I found all mention the following:

In principle, this function does not initialize tm but stores only the values specified. This means that tm should be initialized before the call.

strptime(3) - Linux manual page

It too, is near the bottom of the page.

And yet, for Mac OS X:

If the format string does not contain enough conversion specifications to completely specify the resulting struct tm, the unspecified members of tm are left untouched. For example, if format is “%H:%M:%S”, only tm_hour, tm_sec and tm_min will be modified. If time relative to today is desired, initialize the tm structure with today's date before passing it to strptime().

Mac OS X Manual Page For strptime(3)

The Mac OS X page contains no sample code. The Linux man page contains some sample code that “initializes” the structure with memset(&tm,0,sizeof(struct tm)).

Adding the memset() call to my sample code just made the code always an hour off. Hmmm …

The POSIX page also contains sample code:

struct tm tm;
time_t t;

if (strptime("6 Dec 2001 12:33:45", "%d %b %Y %H:%M:%S", &tm) == NULL)
    /* Handle error */;

tm.tm_isdst = -1; /* Not set by strptime(); tells mktime()
                     to determine whether daylight saving time
                     is in effect */
t = mktime(&tm);
if (t == -1)
    /* Handle error */;

Remember when I mentioned that the test code I wrote would sometimes be an hour out? The tm.tm_isdst field, which is part of the C Standard, wasn't set correctly!

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarg!

Changing my sample code to:

struct tm tm;
time_t    t;

strptime("Fri, 20 May 2005 02:23:22 EDT","%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %Z",&tm);
tm.tm_isdst = -1; /* I WAS MISSING THIS LINE! */
t = mktime(&tm);

And it works.

Except in mod_blog, the time is always four hours out.

I finally tracked that one down, and it's Apache's fault. I found that if I set the Last-Modified header to something like “Fri, 20 May 2005 02:23:22 EDT”, Apache will ever so helpfully convert that to “Fri, 20 May 2005 02:23:22 GMT”.

Let me repeat that—Apache will replace just the timezone with “GMT”! It does not try to convert the time, just the zone.