Comments on: Date-/Time-Calculations using AppleScript

By: Report the time in another city with Applescript — KnowIT

Report the time in another city with Applescript — KnowIT — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 00:49:46 +0000

[...] trying to subtract numbers from the date in the script I eventually found help at Erik’s Lab: Date-/Time-Calculations using AppleScript. That gave me the very simple 2 lines I needed to subtract 20 hours from my time to get Santa [...]

By: Erik

Erik — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 08:48:34 +0000

You seem to be living in a DDMMYY locale, meaning your solution will work for people living in such a locale. In the US the short date string looks like this MMDDYY, so it wouldn’t work as expected or worse, result in a wrong value going unnoticed.

One should always be on the lookout for such problems and circumvent them by being as locale-agnostic as possible.

By: Wesley Konrad

Wesley Konrad — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 01:30:19 +0000

I came up with a faster solution to return the month as an integer

set bob to current date
set intMonth to (word 2 of (short date string of bob)) as integer

Although this will only work depending on how the text item delimiters are set.

By: Erik

Erik — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 07:33:12 +0000

Scott, let me think about this. There are a couple of solutions popping into my head right now. I’ll write a post about the subject.

By: Scott

Scott — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 20:34:59 +0000

so I’m trying to write and applescript to compare the create and modified time stamps of a file
so I’m talking about a format like
2009-03-09 18:03:47 -0400
and
2009-03-09 15:03:47 -0700

which are for all intents and purposes are equal, but apple script wont let me cast them as date type. are there any built-ins or tricks for evaluating this kind of format with applescript or even the date command from a terminal?

thanks

By: stib

stib — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 02:11:51 +0000

per:
set mM to (month of (current date)) as integer
will do it

By: stib

stib — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 01:29:25 +0000

Oh I got it. I had the shell scripts in a subroutine and was doing
on readdate()
set lastopen to do shell script (”defaults read org.pureandapplied.startupscript ‘lastopen’”)
return lastopen
end

But for some reason the subroutine doesn’t get evaluated as a date. If I force it to return a date it works, so I use
return date lastopen
not
return lastopen

By: stib

stib — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 01:23:48 +0000

I even tried adding the -date switch to the defaults command, but it seems to use a different format

By: stib

stib — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 01:14:30 +0000

I’m trying to write a simple app for my start up folder that checks to see whether this is the first time I’ve booted up today so it can open stuff that I need when I first get in to work, but which I don’t want to see if I restart during the day.

I do it by getting the app to store the last login date in my preferences, and compare the last login with today. But If I do

do shell script (“defaults write org.pureandapplied.startupscript ‘lastopen’ ‘” & (current date) & “‘”)
set lastopen to do shell script (“defaults read org.pureandapplied.startupscript ‘lastopen’”)
day of lastopen

it doesn’t treat the value returned as a date:
“Can’t make \”Wednesday, 14 January 2009 12:05:29 PM\” into type date.”

I can do it with text munging, or by checking the modification date on a file, but that’s nowhere near as elegant.

By: Drew

Drew — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 16:06:39 +0000

What if I wanted to get a date in this format: “2008-12-02 16:03:45.180″?