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Date-Time Conversion Utility

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21 Sep 2001 2  
A simple app that converts to and between time_t, DATE, and regular date string expressions

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Introduction

Lately, I've had to do a lot of work with CTime and COleDateTime object variables. They're pretty nice classes to work with but not when you're debugging and need to know their actual date-time values. The CTime class stores its value in a time_t member variable and COleDateTime uses the DATE type to keep its value. Unfortunately, when we need to know what they mean in human-readable format, such as 11/03/1999 14:08:56, it's not possible without explicitly writing some code to format them into a string. Well, I got tired of writing such code so instead I wrote a little application where I could input the value I need to figure out and then have it converted at the click of a button. The application is called DTConverter and it's a simple MFC dialog-based application that allows you to convert to and from a time_t, a DATE, or a regular string in %m/%d/%Y %H:%M:%S format.

I hope it makes debugging your date-time objects less painful. Enjoy it!

Update by Geert Delmeiren

I use COleDateTimeSpan variables. These are also non-human readable, so I extended the utility for converting COleDateTimeSpans also.

For converting a variable, a couple of mouse clicks are needed:

  1. Ctrl-C to copy the variable's value
  2. Click on the utility's session in the task bar
  3. Click in the edit field you want to paste
  4. Ctrl-V to paste the value
  5. Click on the <convert> button to convert the value

That could be quicker! So I extended the utility with (configurable) auto-paste/auto-convert functionality. In the fully automatic mode steps 3) to 5) are obsolete. You just copy the value and activate the utility and... there's the result!

Another small change: The human readable date/time string now uses the format specified in the regional settings.

History

  • 22nd September, 2001 - Added 'Always on Top' and disabling GUI logic to the dialogs

License

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License

This article has no explicit license attached to it but may contain usage terms in the article text or the download files themselves. If in doubt please contact the author via the discussion board below.

A list of licenses authors might use can be found here