Easy way to convert a struct tm (expressed in UTC) to time_t type

Question

How do I do the above? There is mktime function but that treats the input as expressed in local time but how do i perform the conversion if my input tm variable happens to b

Answer 1

The answer of Loki Astari was a good start, timegm is one of the possible solutions. However, the man page of timegm gives a portable version of it, as timegm is not POSIX-compliant. Here it is:

#include <time.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

time_t
my_timegm(struct tm *tm)
{
    time_t ret;
    char *tz;

    tz = getenv("TZ");
    if (tz)
        tz = strdup(tz);
    setenv("TZ", "", 1);
    tzset();
    ret = mktime(tm);
    if (tz) {
        setenv("TZ", tz, 1);
        free(tz);
    } else
        unsetenv("TZ");
    tzset();
    return ret;
}

Answer 2

The following implementation of timegm(1) works swimmingly on Android, and probably works on other Unix variants as well:

time_t timegm( struct tm *tm ) {
  time_t t = mktime( tm );
  return t + localtime( &t )->tm_gmtoff;
}

Answer 3

I was troubled by the issue of mktime() as well. My solution is the following

time_t myTimegm(std::tm * utcTime)
{
    static std::tm tmv0 = {0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 80, 0, 0, 0};    //1 Jan 1980
    static time_t utcDiff =  std::mktime(&tmv0) - 315532801;

    return std::mktime(utcTime) - utcDiff;
}

The idea is to get the time difference by calling std::mktime() with a known time (in this case 1980/01/01) and subtract its timestamp (315532801). Hope it helps.