Question

I'm wondering whether and to what extent TWiki is able to understand dates in different formats.

For example, I have a TWiki form with a couple date fields that by default have the pop-up calendar tool that enters the selected date in the format of "12 Nov 2007." But one user manually entered that date in the format 11/12/2007. I thought that would confuse TWiki, yet when I edited the topic and clicked on the date field calendar, it popped right up to November 12th 2007. In addition, a custom search string I wrote seemed to be able to compare dates written in the different formats. In other words, it appeared to understand that "11/12/2007" was before "6 May 2008."

I'm now trying to build an HTML search form that can be used to filter a list of topics based on their last date modified versus the date value entered by the user in the HTML form. I noticed that the META:TOPICINFO(date) is stored in Unix epoch time, and I'm wondering whether that means the date that gets entered on the search form has to be converted to Unix epoch time in order for TWiki to filter on it, or if TWiki will be able to compare the last date modified to a date value written in mm/dd/yyyy or dd mm yyyy format.

In short, what are TWiki's capabilities for storing and comparing date values in different formats?

Environment

-- GarySprague - 08 May 2008

Answer

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Sorry, closing this question after more than 30 days of inactivity. Please feel free to re-open if necessary.

-- PeterThoeny - 23 Jul 2008