Odd behavior of mktime() - c++

Question

Continuing on my attempt to create a DateTime class , I am trying to store the "epoch" time in my function:
void DateTime::processComponents(int month, int day, int year,
int hour, int minute, int second) {
struct tm time;
time.tm_hour = hour;
time.tm_min = minute;
time.tm_sec = second;
time.tm_mday = day;
time.tm_mon = month;
time.tm_year = year - 1900;
ticks_ = mktime(&time);
processTm(time);
}
void DateTime::processTm(struct tm time) {
second_ = time.tm_sec;
minute_ = time.tm_min;
hour_ = time.tm_hour;
weekday_ = time.tm_wday;
monthday_ = time.tm_mday;
yearday_ = time.tm_yday;
month_ = time.tm_mon;
year_ = time.tm_year + 1900;
}
For an arbitrary date, processComponents(5,5,1990,1,23,45) (June 6, 1990 1:23:45 am), it sets all values correctly and as expected.
However, upon further testing, I find that for processComponents(0,0,1970,0,0,0) (January 1, 1970, 12:00:00 am), mktime(&time) causes time to be screwed up:
time.tm_mon = 11;
time.tm_mday = 30;
time.tm_year = 69;
time.tm_hour = 23;
time.tm_min = 0;
time.tm_sec = 0;
time.tm_isdst = 0;
time.tm_gmtoff = -18000;
time.tm_zone = "EST";
time.tm_wday = 2;
time.tm_yday = 363;
Translating to a date of December 31, 1969 11:00:00 pm.
I can verify that mktime() is responsible, because by commenting out that line, it reports the date and time correctly as January 1, 1970 12:00:00 am.
Why is mktime() only messing up the epoch? And how should I fix / workaround this?
Thanks!

Answer 1

You're passing 0 as the day parameter and putting that into time.tm_mday. That component (and only that component) of struct tm is 1-based, not 0-based.
Don't ask me why.
To specify 01 Jan 1970, 12:00:00am you'd want to call it like so:
processComponents(0,1,1970,0,0,0);
And as sdtom mentioned, you'll want to make sure that tm_isdst is set appropriately - 0 for not in effect, positive for in effect, and negative for you don't know (in which case mktime() should try to guess).
Just to let you know, when I pass the date you have (0 Jan 1970, 00:00:00) to mktime() in MSVC 9 it returns an error (the passed in struct tm is untouched and the returned time_t value is -1).

Answer 2

Since it is off by one hour I would expect daylight savings time. Is the value of time.tm_isdst getting set somewhere? If you aren't setting it, it could be randomly getting set to 1 or 0 which would affect your results.

Answer 3

Passing all zeros to mktime() is interpreted as "Sun Jan 0 00:00:00 1900". Based on this, there needs to be some adjustments...
// the input is local time
// the output is seconds since the epoch
// The epoch is Jan 1, 1970 # 0:00 GMT
time_t mktime_wrapper( int month, int day, int year,
int hour=0, int min=0, int sec=0, bool isDST=-1
)
{
tm t;
t.tm_sec=sec, t.tm_min=min, t.tm_hour=hour, t.tm_isdst=isDST;
t.tm_mday=day, t.tm_mon=month-1, t.tm_year=year-1900;
return mktime( &t );
}