Re: getting the date
Re: getting the date
- Subject: Re: getting the date
- From: Graff <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 18:28:20 -0500
On Dec 30, 2003, at 5:22 PM, Walter Ian Kaye wrote:
At 09:32p +0000 12/30/2003, Nigel Garvey didst inscribe upon an
electronic papyrus:
Here we go again:
set theDate to (current date)
set {year:y, day:d} to theDate
copy theDate to b
set b's month to January
text 3 thru 8 of ((y * 10000 + (b - 2500000 - theDate) div -2500000
*
100 + d) as string)
OK, I give. Can you please *explain* that 2500000 arithmetic?
There has to be a science behind it...
I'll take a stab at it. He's stuffing a date into a number. Each
place in the number will get converted to a character in a text string.
The positions in the resulting string will end up like this:
y y y y m m d d
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
When he takes text 3 thru 8 of the resulting string he will end up with
the format: yymmdd
Here's the breakdown:
y * 10000
Puts years so that they go into positions 1 through 4 (4 from the end)
(b - 2500000 - theDate) div -2500000 * 100
is pretty much equivalent to
((b - theDate) div -2500000 + 1 ) * 100
Which takes the difference (in seconds) between the current date and
and the the same day in January, divides that by 289 days (in seconds)
and adds a month. This gives you the current month, roughly. This
will probably work fine but I'd worry about it being correct under all
circumstances. The "* 100" part is to put that month into positions 5
through 6 (2 from the end)
+ d
This adds the day to the end of the number he is building, it goes in
positions 7 through 8 (right on the end)
The number that is built using this method is 20031230 so he makes that
into a string "20031230" and lops off the first 2 characters to get
"031230".
- Ken
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