Time Durations
Many applications benefit from allowing operators to specify time durations in human-readable form within configuration files, and libmtev provides a suite of functions for parsing strings that represent a span of time into various resolutions.
Duration strings are made up of individual elements, which take the form of an integer with a resolution suffix, such as "1s" for one second, or "3min" for three minutes. Multiple elements may be combined, with or without whitespace, to represent the desired time period, for example, "1min30sec", or "4 weeks 2 days".
Developers may reference mtev_confstr_parse_duration and related convenience functions.
Note that parsed outputs are integers. Results with a fractional remainder will
be floored to the nearest integer. For example, 500ms will be represented in
seconds as 0.
Duration Suffixes
| Time Period | Suffixes |
|---|---|
| nanoseconds | ns |
| microseconds | us |
| milliseconds | ms |
| seconds | s, sec, second, seconds |
| minutes | m, min, minute, minutes |
| hours | h, hr, hour, hours |
| days | d, day, days |
| weeks | w, wk, week, weeks |
Longer time spans such as months and years should be represented as days and/or weeks. These do not have suffixes because they do not represent a fixed number of units (not all months have the same number of days, nor do all years).