sorting lines by date

[David V Glasgow]

Thanks everyone & Curry.  I will play with this some more.  Looking at the lists I am given, most of the date columns are declared to be UTC.  I intended to try to detect other formats in due course, but thought I’d start with the common one.

Reminds me of my favourite Jake Peralta line: “Stupid rest of the world, writing their dates all dumb!”

Cheers, and thanks again.

David G

> On 11 Jul 2020, at 7:06 pm, Curry Kenworthy via use-livecode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Like everything field and text related, this thread caught my eye! :)
> 
> One of my favorite areas of LiveCode, and also one of the areas I have to actively keep an eye on since I rely on it a lot.
> 
> Here's an observation that might help in one way or another....
> 
> David:
> 
> > http://adomain/	27/06/2016 8:10
> 
> > set itemdel to tab
> > sort lines of field "import" datetime by the last item of each
> 
> > the order above is generated.
> > I can’t see any meaningful ordering of the lines.
> 
> I was curious and copied your content into a field where I changed the date format of the dates, like so:
> 
> http://adomain/	06/27/2016 8:10
> http://adomain/	11/17/2013 22:18
> 
> And for me, over here on this side of the ocean (cue Trump rally: USA! USA!) that both looks good, and works well, using your unmodified code. The lines without a date also stacked up at the top, as you predicted, and as I know to be the normal LC sort behavior.
> 
> I realize you need the British format, but again out of curiosity and to make sure everything LC datewise is working properly, you might try your sort again, with a few lines of your content and that modification.
> 
> (There is also a useSystemDate keyword that you could test.)
> 
> Regardless, be assured that ABSOLUTELY it is possible to have datetime sorts working well in fields or text with tabbed columns. Have no doubts or fears in that regard. I very recently delivered a client project, this year, with that feature.
> 
> The only question is efficiency. It would be better and faster to get the datetime sort working directly with your content.
> 
> But if not, you can also sort with a custom function, and then the sky is the limit! LC sort really is powerful and flexible.
> 
> But I would like to know the outcome, so when this is resolved, thanks in advance for posting again to let us know what worked!
> 
> Best wishes,
> 
> Curry Kenworthy
> 
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