System.Time has formatCalendarTime :: TimeLocale -> String -> CalendarTime -> String but no parseCalendarTime. After writing a few inflexible single purpose date parsing functions I decided that it would be easier to just write one that takes a formatting string. I have written a parseCalendarTime :: TimeLocale -> String -> String -> Maybe CalendarTime which accepts all format specifiers that formatCalendarTime accepts. It is far from perfect (19 FIXMEs last time I checked), but it should work for most common cases. The output is not neccessarily a valid date, as the date format used may not contain enough information, and no attempt is made to calculate or validate, for example, the day of the week or the number of days in a month. A CalendarTime is used here as a "slightly more tractable representation of a date/time string" [1]. The code is available at: http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/~d00bring/misc/ParseDate.hs The code is extremely untested. All comments, bug reports, flames and suggestions for improvement are welcome. /Bjorn Bringert [1] http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2002-December/003758.html