>>It could be converted to UTC using something like my Windows Time class in the download section. This way you'd remove any problems with the current bias.
>
>I've been reading several of your posts since this morning to try to find the way to do it based on your high experience in that area. Even after having downloaded your class, I couldn't find a function that would accept that date format string and convert it into a datetime. Could you help me on this?

Michel,

There's no simple way to do this. However, this is what I'd do. First, strip out the character day of the week

ltdt = 'Thu, 20 May 2004 08:50:03 PDT'
ltdt = ALLTRIM(SUBSTR(ltdt, AT(',', ltdt) + 1))

Next, I'd insert the month number, which I'd get from a look-up table

LOCATE FOR LEFT(lddt, 3) = monthname
ltdt = STUFF(ltdt, 4, 3, monthnum)

Then I'd replace the spaces with a slash.

ltdt = STUFF(ltdt, AT(SPACE(1), ltdt), 1, '/')
ltdt = STUFF(ltdt, AT(SPACE(1), ltdt), 1, '/')

Next, I set the date format.

lcdateformat = SET('DATE')
SET DATE TO DMY

Then translate it to a date/time

lcdt = ltdt
ltdt = CTOT(LEFT(ltdt, LEN(ltdt) - 4))
SET DATE (lcdateformat)

Finally, I'd use a lookup table with the last 3 characters of the string. The table would have a structure containing the 3 characters of the timezone (for example: PST, PDT, EST, EDT, etc.) and the bias between it and your timezone. It would probably be a good idea to express this in seconds so that you could simply add it to the date/time you've got. If the bias is negative, adding it would produce the correct result.

LOCATE FOR RIGHT(lcdt, 3) = timezone.timezone
ltdt = ltdt + timezone.bias