bug#25112: 24.5; function to encode time from time string

[Drew Adams]

FYI, I just now came across this library on Emacs Wiki:
https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/strptime.el

It seems to have something similar to the requested enhancement.
It is not something that I can use, and it is no replacement
for the enhancement, but it might help.  The copyright for it
is by A. Aichner of XEmacs.

The library description is this:

 partial implementation of POSIX date and time parsing
 Implemented (partially, specifically without locale support) according to
 http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/strptime.html

The main function (command) it provides is this:

(defun strptime (time format &optional extended)
  "Return a nine element list of TIME, parsed according to FORMAT..."