When dealing with timestamps coming from third parties, sometimes we cannot rely on exact timestamp formats, so it is difficult to parse them using toDate <https://nifi.apache.org/docs/nifi-docs/html/expression-language-guide.html#todate>. (e.g. Syslog messages allow a subset of RFC3339 for timestamps). To circumvent this I started working on an expression language function that could parse all RFC3339 compliant timestamps with expression language in MiNiFi C++, but I feel this functionality would also be a great addition to NiFi.
It would be great if the expression language would remain consistent between MiNiFi C++ and NiFi, and I'm not quite sure where this functionality should be accessible from. - We could either change the current toDate <https://nifi.apache.org/docs/nifi-docs/html/expression-language-guide.html#todate> to accept zero arguments and calling it without argument would try to parse the string as RFC3339 compliant. - or we could introduce a new expression language function e.g. parseRfc3339 What's the community's stance on this? Thanks, Martin
