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Index › Programming Questions & Help › Syntax Questions › date format conversion
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date format conversion (Read 965 times)
snorpey
date format conversion
Oct 23rd, 2007, 12:38am  
Hi!
I just worked out how to get information from rss feeds to processing using the XML Import library. The date imported from the rss file looks something like this: "Tue, 23 Oct 2007 00:27:21 MET". To compare the dates of different entries, i need the months to be converted into digits. So  i wrote the following code that doesn't work. What went wrong?
Code:

// date = Tue, 23 Oct 2007 00:27:21 MET 
String date_splitted[] = split(date, " ");

//  [0]Thu,
//  [1]18
//  [2]Oct
//  [3]2007
//  [4]03:02:01
//  [5]EDT

    if(date_splitted[2] == "Jan"){
	  date_splitted[2] = "1";
    }
    
    else if(date_splitted[2] == "Feb"){
	  date_splitted[2] = "2";
    }
    
    else if(date_splitted[2] == "Mar"){
	  date_splitted[2] = "3";
    }
    
    else if(date_splitted[2] == "Apr"){
	  date_splitted[2] = "4";
    }
    
    else if(date_splitted[2] == "May"){
	  date_splitted[2] = "5";
    }
    
    else if(date_splitted[2] == "Jun"){
	  date_splitted[2] = "6";
    }
    
    else if(date_splitted[2] == "Jul"){
	  date_splitted[2] = "7";
    }
    
    else if(date_splitted[2] == "Aug"){
	  date_splitted[2] = "8";
    }
    
    else if(date_splitted[2] == "Sep"){
	  date_splitted[2] = "9";
    }
    
    else if(date_splitted[2] == "Oct"){
	  date_splitted[2] = "10";
    }
    
    else if(date_splitted[2] == "Nov"){
	  date_splitted[2] = "11";
    }
    
    else if(date_splitted[2] == "Dec"){
	  date_splitted[2] = "12";
    }

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extrapixel
Re: date format conversion
Reply #1 - Oct 23rd, 2007, 1:03am  
Because you can't compare Strings using the == operator.

Problem:
http://processing.org/reference/troubleshooting/#strings
Solution:
http://processing.org/reference/String_equals_.html
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snorpey
Re: date format conversion
Reply #2 - Oct 23rd, 2007, 1:17am  
works great, many thanks!
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JohnG
Re: date format conversion
Reply #3 - Oct 23rd, 2007, 10:52am  
You may be able to save yourself a lot of work by checking out the Java "SimpleDateFormat" class: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/text/SimpleDateFormat.html

I think you should be able to create a SimpleDateFormat object that understands your format, and then you use the parse(...) method to convert a string to a Date object you can use.

I think your time format would be "EEE, d MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss z" in SimpleDateFormat terms.
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