in reply to Formatting Win32::OLE::Variant Dates

From the dark recesses of my mind creeps the following information :

The OLE Variant Datetime is in fact a floating point number, whose integer part denotes the number of days since 31/12/1899, and whose fractional part denotes the part of a day.

So you could try to coax the Variant into a number, and either concatenate $value->Date() and $value->Time() in the hope that Time() only looks at the fractional part, or use that fractional number and convert it into seconds since the epoch by subtracting the number of days between 12/31/1899 and 31/12/1969 from it and some more date trickery.

Of course, the date range of the Variant is much higher than the number of seconds since the epoch, but your program won't be in use 2038 anyway, no ?

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Re:x2 Formatting Win32::OLE::Variant Dates
by grinder (Bishop) on Sep 04, 2001 at 00:36 UTC

    Well of course not! 2038 is unbelievably so far off in the future it will never happen.

    I will of course be living out my retirement at that point, so of course I wash my hands of the whole affair... besides all these young programmers need something to occupy themselves.

    Seriously though, I took your idea and played around a bit and came up with the following:

    #! /usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Win32::OLE::Variant;
use Win32::OLE::NLS qw/ :LOCALE :DATE /;

my $v = Win32::OLE::Variant->new(VT_DATE, shift || 'Sep 3,2001');
print $v->Date( 'yyyy/MM/dd' ), "\n";
print $v->Number( {ThousandSep => '', DecimalSep => '.'}), "\n";

    [download]

    plugging in some values, we get:

    E:\david\perl>perl wov.pl "Sep 3,2001"
2001/09/03
37137.00

E:\david\perl>perl wov.pl "Jan 1,1900"
1900/01/01
2.00

E:\david\perl>perl wov.pl "Jan 2,1900"
1900/01/02
3.00

E:\david\perl>perl wov.pl "Jan 3,1900"
1900/01/03
4.00

    [download]

    So it appears that it will be possible to coax this into an epoch value. Thanks for the pointer.

    update: it works. I'm not sure how I missed this first time around, because I did play with the Time method... As it turns out, the Date and Time methods don't display the value as a date or time, but rather, they display the date or time component of the value. This means that if you want to build up a reasonable timestamp, you merely have to do the following:

      my $t = $v->Date( 'yyyy/MM/dd ' ) . $v->Time( 'HH:mm:ss' );
    --
    g r i n d e r
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