Wish list and follow up to Scotts date problem

[Adrian C Aitken]

Now I don't really want to bug PowerBasic but why can't you read the Windows short date for the DATE$ function instead of forcing everyone to an American format ?
If you can't read the shortdate, at least let us format it to a real date format ie dd/mm/yy (which is pretty universal outside of the USA) since FORMAT$ doesn't like a DATE$ in it.

Regards

Adrian Aitken


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[Peter Lameijn]

It's easy to make a function with a desired date format:

#Include "win32api.inc"
Function LocalDate As String
  Local ST As SystemTime
  GetLocalTime ST
  Function = Format$(ST.WDay,"00") + "-" + _
             Format$(ST.WMonth,"00")   + "-" + _
             Format$(ST.WYear,"0000")
End Function

Function PbMain()
  Print "Date: "; LocalDate
End Function

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Peter.
mailto[email protected][email protected]</A>

[This message has been edited by Peter Lameijn (edited January 21, 2001).]

[Adrian C Aitken]

Thanks Peter, coming from a VB background little things like formatting the date are taken for granted!


Adrian

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[Egbert Zijlema]

Adrian,

Why don't you use the Windows API? It returns exactly what you want.
BTW: "dd/mm/yy" is not "pretty universal outside the US". Actually there are 3 main short date formats:
mm/dd/yyyy = American
dd mm yyyy = European (separator differs per country: slash, hyphen or period)
yyyy/mm/dd = FarEastern, also referred to as Japanese.

mm-dd-yyyy (with hyphen instead of slash) is not American but typical Power Basic.

LOCAL szDate AS ASCIIZ * 11, st AS SYSTEMTIME
GetDateFormat %LOCALE_USER_DEFAULT, %DATE_SHORTDATE, st, "", szDate, SIZEOF(szDate)
MSGBOX szDate

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mailto:[email protected][email protected]</A>
www.basicguru.com/zijlema/

[This message has been edited by Egbert Zijlema (edited January 21, 2001).]

[Paul Dwyer]

Actually the Japanese use the American date system when dealing with English characters and forms which is often. It looks backward to me because I'm from Australia.

My 2c worth



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Paul Dwyer
Network Engineer
Aussie in Tokyo
(Paul282 at VB-World)

[Fred Oxenby]

VB's Format-function is versatile,
This simple function tries to mimic this functionallity.

Function FormatDateTime(ByVal vbDatum As Double,ByVal FormatStr$) As String
'GetDateFormat LCID,Flag,LpDate,LpFormat,LpDateStr,SizeOfLpDateStr
'GetTimeFormat LCID,Flag,LpTime,LpFormat,LpTimeStr,SizeOfTimeStr
'wYear;wMonth;wDayOfWeek;wDay;wHour;wMinute;wSecond;wMilliseconds;
  Local d  As Asciiz * 64
  Local dt As String
  Local st As SYSTEMTIME
  Local Tmp$,FDatum$,FTid$,yy$,mm$,dd$,hh$,mi$,ss$
'..convert from vbdate
  VariantTimeToSystemTime vbDatum, st
'..Format output-string....................
  If Len(Trim$(FormatStr$)) Then
   Tmp$ = UCase$(Trim$(Parse$(FormatStr$," ",1)))
   If Instr(Tmp$,"YY") And Instr(Tmp$,"MM") Then FDatum$=Tmp$
   If Instr(Tmp$,"HH") And Instr(Tmp$,"MM") Then FTid$=Tmp$
   Tmp$ = UCase$(Trim$(Parse$(FormatStr$," ",2)))
   If Instr(Tmp$,"YY") And Instr(Tmp$,"MM") Then FDatum$=Tmp$
   If Instr(Tmp$,"HH") And Instr(Tmp$,"MM") Then FTid$=Tmp$
   yy$=Format$(st.wYear,"0000")
   mm$=Format$(st.wMonth,"00")
   dd$=Format$(st.wDay,"00")
   hh$=Format$(st.wHour,"00")
   mi$=Format$(st.wMinute,"00")
   ss$=Format$(st.wSecond,"00")
   If Instr(FDatum$,"YYYY") Then Replace "YYYY" With yy$ In FDatum$
   If Instr(FDatum$,"YY"  ) Then Replace "YY" With Right$(yy$,2) In FDatum$
   If Instr(FDatum$,"MM"  ) Then Replace "MM" With mm$ In FDatum$
   If Instr(FDatum$,"DD"  ) Then Replace "DD" With dd$ In FDatum$
   If Instr(FTid$,"HH"    ) Then Replace "HH" With hh$ In FTid$
   If Instr(FTid$,"MM"    ) Then Replace "MM" With mi$ In FTid$
   If Instr(FTid$,"SS"    ) Then Replace "SS" With ss$ In FTid$
   Function = FDatum$ + " " + FTid$
  Else
   GetDateFormat 0, %DATE_SHORTDATE, st, ByVal %Null, d, 64
   dt = d
   GetTimeFormat 0, 12, st, ByVal %Null, d, 64
   dt = dt & " " & d
   Function = dt
  End If
End Function

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Fred
mailto:[email protected][email protected]</A>
http://www.oxenby.se

[Adrian C Aitken]

Thanks everyone, I used Peters code but because the application needed the month as a 3 letter code I just added a month() array.
Egbert, when I said dd/mm/yy what I meant was day month year , regardless of seperators!
It would still have been nice to just use format$(date,"dd MMM yyyy") though.

Regards

Adrian Aitken

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[Tom Hanlin]

DATE$ has always returned results in MM-DD-YYYY format. Changing
this would break a lot of existing code and make it confusing for
folks who aim to convert the date string into numeric format.
Considering how little code it takes to rearrange the date into
the format of your choosing, this is not a likely prospect. It
may be that we'll see something like a DATE$[(format)] or
some such addition to a future version of PowerBASIC, though.
This is on the wish list.

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Tom Hanlin
PowerBASIC Staff