Grabbing the Date and Time From a Time Server on the Internet

[Bob Sneidar]

I may have sent you a version that was bugged. This is the final one I came up with:

function realTime theFormat, useOffset
   if useOffset is empty then put false into useOffset
   put "http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/cgi-bin/timer.pl" into theURL
   get url theURL
   put it into theResult
   filter theResult with "<BR>*UTC*"
   replace "<BR>" with empty in theResult
   put word 1 to 3 of theResult into theResult
   if useOffset then
      put word -1 of theResult into theTime
      put word -1 of the internet date into theZoneOffset
      put theZoneOffset /100 into theZoneOffset
      set the itemdelimiter to ":"
      put (item 1 of theTime + theZoneOffset) into item 1 of theTime
      put theTime into word -1 of theResult
   end if
   
   if theFormat is "seconds" then
      put word -1 of theResult into theResult
      convert theResult to seconds
   end if
   
   return theResult
end realTime

Bob

On Aug 15, 2011, at 3:06 PM, Peter M. Brigham, MD wrote:

> In my testing, the convert command fails with the date as given by the webpage, because the date lacks the year. Hence the need to insert the year first. And there needs to be no comma in the date.
> 
> -- Peter
> 
> Peter M. Brigham
> pmbrig at gmail.com
> http://home.comcast.net/~pmbrig
> 
> 
> On Aug 15, 2011, at 3:54 PM, Bob Sneidar wrote:
> 
>> Maybe a little more concise:
>> 
>> function realTime theFormat
>>   breakpoint
>>   put "http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/cgi-bin/timer.pl" into theURL
>>   get url theURL
>>   put it into theResult
>>   filter theResult with "<BR>*UTC*"
>>   replace "<BR>" with empty in theResult
>>   put word 1 to 3 of theResult into theResult
>>   if theFormat is "seconds" then
>>       put word -1 of theResult into theResult
>>       convert theResult to seconds
>>   end if
>>   -- add more conversions here
>>   return theResult
>> end realTime
>> 
>> On Aug 15, 2011, at 12:15 PM, Peter M. Brigham, MD wrote:
>> 
>>> I'll try sending this again, revised (third time -- someone let me know please if it's getting through). It returns the time fast enough (with a speedy connection) to be within a second or so.
>>> 
>>> ------------------
>>> 
>>> You can fetch the time from the U.S. Naval Observatory atomic clock. This assumes an internet connection, though. If what you want to do is timestamp something, just fetch the "universal time" line (line 6 of the HTML returned):
>>> 
>>> function fetchTime
>>> put line 6 of URL "http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/cgi-bin/timer.pl" into t
>>> -- returns "<BR>Aug. 15, 19:12:46 UTC" & tab & tab & "Universal Time"
>>> replace "<BR>" with empty in t
>>> set the itemdelimiter to tab
>>> delete item 2 to -1 of t
>>> set the itemdelimiter to comma
>>> delete word -1 of t
>>> put t into ts
>>> put the short date into di
>>> convert di to dateitems
>>> put item 1 of di into tYr
>>> put space & tYr after item 1 of t
>>> put space & tYr after item 1 of ts
>>> replace comma with empty in t
>>> replace comma with empty in ts
>>> convert ts to seconds
>>> put t & cr & ts
>>> return t -- if you want "Aug. 15, 19:12:46"    or,
>>> return ts -- if you want the seconds
>>> end fetchTime
>>> 
>>> -- Peter
>>> 
>>> Peter M. Brigham
>>> pmbrig at gmail.com
>>> http://home.comcast.net/~pmbrig
>>> On Aug 15, 2011, at 1:25 PM, Bob Sneidar wrote:
>>> 
>>>> This returns a ton of html, from which the date time can be filtered using "<H2>*", but since it takes about 30 seconds to run, and returns 32 entries, I am not sure how useful this would for him, if he wanted an exact time (within a second or two). 
>>>> 
>>>> Time servers are NTP:\\ aren't they? Looks like the revURL library does not support NTP, or not that I can see. Any attempt to use it in a URL returns empty in it and invalid URL: in the result. 
>>>> 
>>>> A quick browse for http based time servers came up dry. 
>>>> 
>>>> Bob
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> On Aug 13, 2011, at 11:15 AM, Mark Wieder wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> Gregory-
>>>>> 
>>>>> Saturday, August 13, 2011, 10:33:29 AM, you wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>>> Taking another kick at the cat here.  I’d like to use something like
>>>>> 
>>>>>>    get url (http://[time server address])
>>>>> 
>>>>> How's this?
>>>>> 
>>>>> http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/cgi-bin/anim
>>>>> 
>>>>> -- 
>>>>> -Mark Wieder
>>>>> mwieder at ahsoftware.net
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
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