Working with seconds, what am I missing?

[Andrew Henshaw]

Thanks everyone,

From all the tests this seems to be the best option,  but converting the date to the date items it comes back reliably with the same date and time on all settings ive tried,  eg UK and US,  switching the computers date in and out of daylight savings time etc.

Its odd as I had expected  livecode to convert the seconds to and from a date in the same way as all the online tools that convert unix time based on seconds since the epoch,  but apparently it does depend on which format you convert to as to what time it is. 

Dateitems works fine though!

Thanks

Andy


On 23 Apr 2012, at 09:07, Kay C Lan wrote:

> Andy,
> 
> As you've discovered seconds is based on GMT so it will cause differences
> based on everyone's system settings, there are work arounds as suggested
> but it may be easier just to:
> 
> put the date into tDate
> convert tDate to dateItems
> put tDate
> 
> The output will always be YYYY,MM,DD,HH,MM,SS,day of week, and if you
> haven't included a time then, YYYY,MM,DD,0,0,0,day of week.
> 
> Regardless of the system setting, the GMT correction, or personal
> preferences, you can always correctly determine the local date and time of
> a users computer using dateItems.
> 
> HTH
> 
> On Mon, Apr 23, 2012 at 4:55 AM, Andrew Henshaw <henshaw at me.com> wrote:
> 
>> Trying to work with seconds to avoid format issues with dates in different
>> countries I keep running into this issue,  and im probably just missing
>> something very obvious!
>> 
>> Using the following simple code today (the 22nd April)..
>> 
>>  put the date into tDate
>>  convert tDate to seconds
>>  put tDate
>> 
>> Returns 1335049200
>> 
>> Id expect to get a result of 22nd April,  but instead Ive fed that in to a
>> few online UNIX time converters and they all return Sat, 21 Apr 2012
>> 23:00:00 GMT which is an hour into the previous day.
>> 
>> Im assuming its something to do with GMT / daylight savings time,  but is
>> there a reliable way to get and use the seconds.  Id like to ensure the
>> values stored are correct.
>> 
>> Andy
>> _______________________________________________
>> use-livecode mailing list
>> use-livecode at lists.runrev.com
>> Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your
>> subscription preferences:
>> http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
>> 
> _______________________________________________
> use-livecode mailing list
> use-livecode at lists.runrev.com
> Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences:
> http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode