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Re: Representing UTC time in a readable format
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Re: Representing UTC time in a readable format


  • Subject: Re: Representing UTC time in a readable format
  • From: Jean-Denis Muys <email@hidden>
  • Date: Sat, 5 Jun 2004 17:14:03 +0200

On Jun 5, 2004, at 7:00 AM, email@hidden wrote:
12. Re: Representing UTC time in a readable format (James J. Merkel)

Message: 12
Cc: Cocoa-Dev Mail <email@hidden>
From: "James J. Merkel" <email@hidden>
Subject: Re: Representing UTC time in a readable format
Date: Fri, 4 Jun 2004 20:53:05 -0700
To: email@hidden

On 2004-06-04, at 11.59, Jeremy Dronfield wrote:

I'd like to be able to insert a time readout represented as UTC time in
my text. Since there doesn't appear to be a Cocoa way to do it, I'm
doing this to get the UTC date/time:

UTCDateTime *utcDateTime;
OSStatus error = GetUTCDateTime((UTCDateTime *)&utcDateTime,
kUTCDefaultOptions);
UInt16 high = utcDateTime->highSeconds;
UInt32 low = utcDateTime->lowSeconds;

NSLog(@"utcDateTime:%qu", utcDateTime);
NSLog(@"high:%hu", high);
NSLog(@"low:%u", low);

which gives me a log output like this:

utcDateTime:207691735333048
high:997
low:3040632576

How can I translate this into a standard human-readable representation
of UTC time? I'm not clear about the relationship between the high and
low bits, and which I should use.

I think what you are asking is how to convert a time that is expressed
in seconds from Jan 1, 1970 (i.e. Unix C time() style format) to a
human readable representation in an NSString. If so, you can use the
functions in the C time.h library and build an NSString as follows:


Actually, this is probably incorrect, as GetUTCDateTime returns a date with an epoch of Jan 1, 1904. Here is an unoptimized function that converts the UTCDateTime struct filled by that call to a NSCalendarDate:

NSCalendarDate *UTCTimeToNSCalendarDate(UTCDateTime *anUTCtime)
{
unsigned long long timeAsULL = (((unsigned long long)anUTCtime->highSeconds) << 32) + anUTCtime->lowSeconds;

NSDecimalNumber *intSeconds = [NSDecimalNumber numberWithUnsignedLongLong:timeAsULL];
NSDecimalNumber *fracSeconds = [NSDecimalNumber numberWithUnsignedInt:anUTCtime->fraction];
NSDecimalNumber *fracBase = [NSDecimalNumber numberWithUnsignedLong:65536];
NSDecimalNumber *subSeconds = [fracSeconds decimalNumberByDividingBy:fracBase];
NSDecimalNumber *nowAsDec = [intSeconds decimalNumberByAdding:subSeconds];

NSTimeInterval nowAsDouble = [nowAsDec doubleValue];

NSCalendarDate *UTCepoch = [NSCalendarDate dateWithYear:1904 month:1 day:1 hour:0 minute:0 second:0 timeZone:[NSTimeZone timeZoneForSecondsFromGMT:0]];

NSCalendarDate *nowAsDate = [UTCepoch addTimeInterval:nowAsDouble];
return nowAsDate;
}

Then of course, it's easy to display it. For example:

UTCDateTime nowAsUTC;
OSStatus OSerr = GetUTCDateTime(&nowAsUTC, kUTCDefaultOptions);
NSCalendarDate *now = UTCTimeToNSCalendarDate(&nowAsUTC);
[someText appendString: [now description]];

Of course, this doesn't take into account all the interesting information about UTC that has been delivered in this thread!

Regards,

Jean-Denis
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