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Date arithmetic with time results (Read 5242 times)

Boris Gordon Full Member Offline Posts: 8	Date arithmetic with time results Aug 23^rd, 2008, 11:45am The result of Number = $Date1 - $Date2 gives the number of days between Date1 and Date2. What's the best way to get the result in hours or minutes as a difference in times (i.e. I want the difference in timestamps) ?
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Mark Bernstein YaBB Administrator Online designer of Tinderbox Posts: 1094 Eastgate Systems, Inc.	Re: Date arithmetic with time results Reply #1 - Aug 23^rd, 2008, 12:06pm Offhand, you could coerce the dates to integers, and subtract the integers; this would give you the difference in seconds. MyInt1=$Date1; MyInt2=$Date2;Interval=$MyInt1-$MyInt2; Or, you could use a simple shell script: runCommand("MyScript "+format($Date1,"")+" "+format($Date2,"")
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Boris Gordon Full Member Offline Posts: 8	Re: Date arithmetic with time results Reply #2 - Aug 23^rd, 2008, 12:35pm Solution 1 looks good but I am getting weird results. e.g. MyInt1=$Created gives a value of 24 and a later date/time gives the same number.
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maurice

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Re: Date arithmetic with time results
Reply #3 - Sep 30^th, 2008, 5:18am

Same is happening to me, with Tb 4.5.2. I have two Date attributes, Start and Stop, and two Numerical attributes (IntStart=$Start;IntStop=$Stop)

The two dates show different times on the same day (30 September). The two numerical attributes are identical ie 30. They seem only to recognise whole days, not shorter intervals, so don't appear capable of calculating the difference between two times in seconds.

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Mark Anderson YaBB Administrator Offline Wiki Gardeners Posts: 1709 Southsea, UK	Re: Date arithmetic with time results Reply #4 - Sep 30^th, 2008, 5:44am IntStart=(format($MyDate,"s")
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maurice

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Re: Date arithmetic with time results
Reply #5 - Sep 30^th, 2008, 7:12am

Thanks - but I'm not sure I've got this right yet. When I put the result of the "format" function into a text string (or output it as a number), the result is 0.

ie what I now have is a Date attribute (Date1) and a seconds attribute (Secs1) and this Rule:

Secs1=(format($Date1,"s")

I must be overlooking something, but what?

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Mark Anderson

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Re: Date arithmetic with time results
Reply #6 - Sep 30^th, 2008, 7:43am

Yes, but if you pass a text string of numbers, for example "30" to a number attribute it should coerce that to a number. So I'd avoid left-zero-padded numbers and text in your format strings.

What there isn't (feature request?) is a format that gives you the date in browser JavaScript style as a number of milliseconds since X (for JS, X = GMT midnight 1/1/1970).

Exactly how you go about this rather depends on the sorts of durations your trying to capture. IOW, are we measuring a few minutes worth of seconds or decades worth. In the latter case you might want to look at a command line or shell script to do the heavy lift of calculation.

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maurice Full Member Offline Posts: 64 London, UK	Re: Date arithmetic with time results Reply #7 - Sep 30^th, 2008, 4:10pm Thanks Mark, I'll play around a bit more...
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