sort dateTime problem

[Timothy Miller]

>From: Jim Ault <JimAultWins at ...>
>Subject: Re: sort dateTime problem
>Newsgroups: gmane.comp.ide.revolution.user
>Date: 2005-12-15 04:48:31 GMT (20 hours and 30 minutes ago)
>
>Works here...
>sort lines of cd field "schedule.2" datetime by item 2 of each
>
>What is the itemDel set to just before this step?
>Are there any delimiters in what seems to be item 1?
>Is there any reason the short date is not valid?
>(eg 13/4/04 does not exist)
>
>Jim Ault
>Las Vegas
>
>On 12/14/05 4:53 PM, "Timothy Miller" <gandalf at ...>
>wrote:
>>  One line of a script I'm working on goes:
>>
>>  sort lines of cd field "schedule.2" datetime by item 2 of each.
>>
>>  Each line has four items. Item 2 consists of dates in short date
>>  format, e.g., 12/2/04.
>>
>>  All 2005 dates come up in correct sequence, from earliest to latest.
>>  However, after sorting, 2004 dates *follow* 2005 dates, instead of
>>  preceding them. That is not a correct sort.
>>
>>  Am I doing something wrong?


Hey, Jim, thanks.

If it works on your machine, I suppose I'm doing something wrong. Hmmm...

I just did quite a bit of haphazard troubleshooting. I isolated the 
problem. The short dates are all preceded by a spacebar character. If 
I remove the spacebar characters, the sort works correctly. This is 
easily reproduced. It doesn't seem to matter whether items, lines or 
words are being sorted.

I don't know about dates or times in other formats. I don't know 
about more than one spacebar character. I didn't check.

Further testing shows that, in the problem script, converting a short 
date to seconds, if the short date is preceded by a spacebar 
character, produces a negative number. If the original date is in 
year 2005, the negative seconds covert back to a date in 1950 or so.

More testing:

If I use a simple script in button or msg box, then converting 
"4/19/05" to seconds produces the same value as converting 
"<spacebar>4/19/05" to seconds.

OTOH, if a script with a repeat loop converts several words, items, 
or lines, one at a time, from short date to seconds, a leading 
spacebar character in the short date produces incorrect results.

That doesn't seem right, does it? Okay, I'll reproduce it more 
carefully, just to be sure.

Yup, I reproduced it.

This seems like a flaw in the way Rev interprets certain dates, under 
certain circumstances.

Comments?

Cheers,


Tim