Help with date/time - I am going nuts...

[moster67]

I have run into the wall and my brain can't cope anylonger

I think I need some help...my maths today is not working nor is my locigal thinking

I am adding a timer-event in the future which must be expressed in ticks without milliseconds. I need to set a Start-Date and a Start-Time.

For example:
Start-Day: Sunday Feb 12, 2012
Start-Time: 23:00

Using a online-converter, Sunday Feb 12, 2012 (23:00) would become 1329084000

which can be calculated as follows:
Sunday Feb 12, 2012 (00:00) = 1329001200
23 hours = 82800 (3600 seconds * 23 hours)
1329001200 + 82800 = 1329084000

Those are my reference-data so I know how the ticks should look like.

I am getting the date and the hours using the Dialogs-library.
User-inputs:
date: 12/02/2012
hour: 23:00:00

Anyone who is willing to show me the code necessary to obtain 1329084000 ?

Thanks!

 

[margret]

Dtae - Time

I know this may be a dumb question but can you not check for the current date and once it is equal to the date selected, then check against the current time until the selected time is reached?

Are you running a service and if so, how often does it check for this?

 

[moster67]

To me nothing is a dumb question (at least in the state my brain is in now)

No, it is not a service. My app sets a timer-event on a satellite-decoder (running under Linux) and therefore I need to pass on the dates in Epoch & Unix Timestamps (which are our ticks less milliseconds).

Here is a converter-tool I am using and so you can get an idea what I am talking about:

Epoch Converter - Unix Timestamp Converter

 

[thedesolatesoul]

Here is part of it:

t = DateTime.TimeParse("23:00:00")-DateTime.timeParse("00:00:00")
Log(t)
t= t/DateTime.TicksPerSecond 
Log(t)

EDIT:
Added more:

k = DateTime.DateParse("02/12/2012")-DateTime.DateParse("01/01/1970")
t = DateTime.TimeParse("23:00:00")-DateTime.timeParse("00:00:00")
k = k/DateTime.TicksPerSecond 
t= t/DateTime.TicksPerSecond 
Log(k+t)

Only I dont know how to show it as an integer in the logs.

EDIT:
Also your calculations are wrong: Sunday Feb 12, 2012 (00:00) = 1329001200
according to the website this is: 1329004800
[unless timezones will affect these?]
actually my code returns: 1,329,008,400 for the same date!
about 1 hour off target?

 

[margret]

I ran the code and the online converter and got a different answer from the ones you both listed. I do think it is because of my time zone, USA-Tennessee. I do think the time zone makes a difference.

 

[moster67]

@thedesolatesoul

Thank you very much for your time helping me. Your code-snippets were exactly what I was looking for.

To your code, I added a check for "DateTime.TimeZoneOffset" and modified final output accordingly. Now I am able to pass on the dates and times in Unix Timestamp-format to the decoder and everything works

In the next days, I will check if I need to take into consideration also Daylight Saving settings or not.

BTW: We surely got different results due to being in different time-zones. However, UTC should be the same.