Hi everyone,

This post is to help everyone deal with all the possible date/time formats that we encounter with all the different mass spec file formats. The main issue is that there is no set format used by the mass spec companies to record the date/time the time the data were collected. For example, if you measured your data on June 5th 2018, it may be recorded as 5/6/2018, or 6/5/2018, and iolite has no way of telling which is the day and which is the month. It gets even worse when you have date formats like January 5, 2018, which to the human reader is quite unambiguous, but to a computer it may be looking for digits and slashes in the format <dd>/<dd>/<dddd> and will stop when it finds "January". This problem is mainly confined to Agilent and X-Series data files... which combined make up about 75% of data we come across.

To get around this problem, iolite allows you to set the date/time format in your file by going to the iolite preferences window within iolite 4. If you don't know your date time format, you can open one of your raw data files in something like NotePad or TextEdit (but not Excel, which automatically changes things in your file) and looking for the line where the date/time is recorded. Make sure you close the file without saving it.

iolite provides some of the most common formats in the dropdown list, so if your format is listed, you can just set it and leave it at that. If your format is not listed, or if you are not sure which format to use, please read on for the full description of how the date/time is handled.

NOTE: one possibly confusing change between iolite 3 and iolite 4: the minutes part of the time format is referred to as xx (as in hh:xx:ss) in iolite 3. This was to distinguish the minutes from months. In iolite 4, minutes are referred to as mm, and months are referred to as MM (or the variants listed below). If you have any questions, please post on this thread.

Firstly, the line containing the date/time is searched for a string (a "string" is any combination of letters, numbers and other characters e.g. "abc_ 123?$") that looks something like:

[digits or letters][<separator>][digits or letters][<separator>][digits or letters][<separator>][digits]:[digits]|:[digits]| |AM or PM|

where
<separator> may be -, / or a space; and
the groups between | symbols are optional (as in, they may or may not be present). That is, seconds and the AM/PM parts are optional. The rest of the pattern must be present or you'll see an error about iolite not being able to read the date stamp.

So, for example, the line below would be ok
15/6/2011 12:57:12 PM

As would
jan 29 2016 5:58 (because the seconds and AM/PM parts are optional)

Once iolite has found that pattern, it will separate it into its parts. So, for example the line
15/6/2011 12:57:12 PM
would be converted to
15 6 2011 12 57 12 PM

You can then tell iolite what each part means. The symbols representing the different parts are described below. Note that if you use one of the provided time formats, iolite still ignores the separators.

Expression Output
d the day as number without a leading zero (1 to 31)
dd the day as number with a leading zero (01 to 31)
ddd the abbreviated localized day name (e.g. 'Mon' to 'Sun')
dddd the long localized day name (e.g. 'Monday' to 'Sunday')
M the month as number without a leading zero (1-12)
MM the month as number with a leading zero (01-12)
MMM the abbreviated localized month name (e.g. 'Jan' to 'Dec')
MMMM the long localized month name (e.g. 'January' to 'December')
yy the year as two digit number (00-99)
yyyy the year as four digit number

h the hour without a leading zero (0 to 23 or 1 to 12 if AM/PM is present)
hh the hour with a leading zero (00 to 23 or 01 to 12 if AM/PM is present)
m the minute without a leading zero (0 to 59)
mm the minute with a leading zero (00 to 59)
s the second without a leading zero (0 to 59)
ss the second with a leading zero where applicable (00 to 59)

NOTE:
-iolite will automatically check for the AM/PM part, so you don't need to specify that part
-you don't need to specify if decimal seconds are present (e.g. 07:54:01.453 is still represented as hh:mm:ss)

Examples (remember all separators are replaced by spaces by iolite):
jan 29 2016 5:58 MMM dd yyyy h mm
15/6/2011 12:57:12 PM dd M yyyy hh mm ss

If you have any questions, please reply to this post. Hopefully, together, we can put together a comprehensive list. Even better would be if the mass spec companies used a set format (so feel free to complain to your local rep ).