strptime?

[Dan Kelley]

HI,

I'm an erlang noob.  I'm trying write a program in erlang that will replace
a program that's currently implemented in python.  The program needs to
parse XML documents, perform some calculations on the contents, and populate
a write-through cache that's backed by a database.

Some of the elements that I'm parsing out of the XML documents are date
strings, which look like "20091215015928".  In the python program, I'm
parsing these into datetime.datetime objects, which I then use as dictionary
keys in the cache.

While working on the erlang version of the program, I tried to find the
erlang stdlib date parsing routines.  To my surprise, I couldn't find any
helper functions for parsing datetime representations out of strings.  This
seems unlikely enough that there's a chance I'm missing something obvious.
 Am I?

Thanks,

Dan