variable to date

[russ Boehle]

I have a variable that contains the month ie "January" and another vbl that contains the year ie "2002". How can I convert this to a date value such as 01/01/2002? Sort of the reverse of CMONTH. (I can do this in the expression builder with a long if statement but there must be a better way) Thanks in advance.


Russ

[Tom Cone Jr]

RE: variable to date

Russ,

Looks like something that could be created as a global UDF and contributed to the Code Archive!

DMONTH("January") could return "01"

DMONTH("February") could return "02"

and so on


It could be extended to cover

DMONTH("Feb") could return "02"

DMONTH("Jul") could return "07"

etc.

When you design the function you might want to force the argument to upper case before processing it within the function. That way you'd be covering all possible capitalization sequences.

-- tom

[russ Boehle]

RE: variable to date

Any takers?
I hope someone beats me to it.

I'll look at this tonight. I guess in a UDF a case or select would work OK.

Russ

[Steve Workings]

RE: variable to date

I'll put this in the code archive, too:

' -------------------------------------------------------
' by Steve Workings - February 12, 2003
' Converts Month name or standard month abbreviation to
' 2-character number
'
' Sample usage:
' ?DMONTH("Jan")
' = "12"
' -------------------------------------------------------
FUNCTION DMonth AS C (MonthName AS C )
select
case "Jan" $ MonthName
DMonth = "01"
case "Feb" $ MonthName
DMonth = "02"
case "Mar" $ MonthName
DMonth = "03"
case "Apr" $ MonthName
DMonth = "04"
case "May" $ MonthName
DMonth = "05"
case "Jun" $ MonthName
DMonth = "06"
case "Jul" $ MonthName
DMonth = "07"
case "Aug" $ MonthName
DMonth = "08"
case "Sep" $ MonthName
DMonth = "09"
case "Oct" $ MonthName
DMonth = "10"
case "Nov" $ MonthName
DMonth = "11"
case "Dec" $ MonthName
DMonth = "12"
end select
END FUNCTION

[russ Boehle]

RE: variable to date

Jeez, you're fast!
Thanks, I did it temporarily as a calc fld using case but will convert to this.

Russ

[Tom Cone Jr]

RE: variable to date

Steve,

might I suggest a small change to avoid capitalization issues with the input value:

Instead of:

case "Jan" $ MonthName
DMonth = "01"
case "Feb" $ MonthName
DMonth = "02"

how about:

case "JAN" $ Upper(MonthName )
DMonth = "01"
case "FEB" $ UPPER(MonthName )
DMonth = "02"

and so on ?


-- tom

[Steve Workings]

RE: variable to date

I thought about it as I did it. Your suggestion is one of several improvements that could be made. But, for this specific one, upper/lower case shouldn't be an issue.

- Steve

[Lenny Forziati]

RE: variable to date

I agree with Steve that case should not be an issue in this example. See the code below from an interactive window:

?"Dec" = "DEC"
= .T.
?"Dec" == "DEC"
= .F.

That said, in many instances it is a good idea to force upper to eliminate any case-related issues. But instead of the code Tom has offered, it would be more efficient to simply add a the following as the first line and then leave the rest as Steve has provided.

MonthName = Upper(MonthName)

Done this way, the Upper() is always only run once, compared to as many as 12 times (for December) in Tom's example. Upper() is pretty fast so your users may not notice the performance difference - I just wanted to point this out though for future reference when you may be doing something more complex than Upper().

-Lenny