ISO-8601 with time zone designator, format handling with fCalendar/chron

I have searched the forum but couldn't find a similar problem. 
Currently I am working with a very large set of XML files and the date is
formatted something like that
(YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss+TZD)

zoo allows you to specify the date format.

as for your XML format, the CRAN package 'XML'
http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Descriptions/XML.html
should allow you to parse your data into a format that is suitable for 
passing into zoo.

Regards,

   - Brian