Re: Timezone related fields in DATE_FORMAT() specifiers

[Athanasios Viennas]

To set the context of my question six different formats is a result of lack of standardisation in date headers mail clients put e.g.:

11 May 2018 22:28:51 +0300
Sun, 23 Feb 2020 02:01:31 -0600
Thu, 29 Mar 2018 21:36:14 +0000 (UTC)
Sat, 6 Jan 2018 06:17:51 GMT
Fri, 7 Jul 2017 18:03:11 +0800 (GMT+08:00)
Mon, 13 May 2019 18:31:16

Of course one approach is to get the normalised date prior to table insertion however that is not a good option as this is a lengthy process if we are talking about walking in many thousand logical rows in parsed e-mail messages.

The ideal choice would be to have a timezone specifier in STR_TO_DATE() and only have to identify the input pattern and pass a different specifier template for each case.