Twitter's API date format
If you are using Twitter's API you've probably come across their particular way of formatting dates on user's tweets:
created_at: "Sun Aug 15 14:15:50 +0000 2021",
Let's see how we would parse that into something like this:
~U[2021-08-15 14:15:50Z]
Timex
Let's use Timex for parsing.
Add this to you project dependencies:
# ...
defp deps do
[
{:timex, "~> 3.7"}
# ...
Parse the date string
Let's use the strftime date formatting language:
twitter_date = "Sun Aug 15 14:15:50 +0000 2021"
twitter_date
|> Timex.parse!("%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %z %Y", :strftime)
# ~U[2021-08-15 14:15:50Z]
We can use Timex own date formatting language too:
twitter_date = "Sun Aug 15 14:15:50 +0000 2021"
twitter_date
|> Timex.parse!("{WDshort} {Mshort} {D} {h24}:{m}:{s} {Z} {YYYY}")
# ~U[2021-08-15 14:15:50Z]
Alternatively you can skip parsing the timezone and thus get
a naive datetime ---with no timezone info--- where you could
do an extra step to convert it from NaiveDateTime to
DateTime:
twitter_date = "Sun Aug 15 14:15:50 +0000 2021"
twitter_date
|> Timex.parse!("%a %b %d %H:%M:%S +0000 %Y", :strftime)
# ~N[2021-08-15 14:15:50] # no timezone information!
|> DateTime.from_naive!("Etc/UTC")
# ~U[2021-08-15 14:15:50Z]