I know I have seen this in my books, but I cannot find it now.
How do you convert a list of all months to numbers for use in a script?
IE January=01
February=02
etc.
When the script gets a (month of current date), it returns the value in the number format.
This may be a little verbose but it works:
Jon
There are many ways to do it. Here’s one that I don’t claim to be the best or most efficient.
set monthNumber to my getMonthNum(current date)
on getMonthNum(date_)
set monthNames to "Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec"
set counter to 0
set mth to text 1 thru 3 of ((month of date_) as string)
repeat
set counter to counter + 1
if word counter of monthNames is mth then
set monthNum to counter
exit repeat
end if
end repeat
return monthNum
end getMonthNum
– Rob
You may be interested in my discussion of “French Vanilla” in the Code Exchange section of this site:
http://macscripter.net/exchange/index.php?id=P119
Since posting that, I’ve come up with an “English Fudge” variant, which works with any AppleScript date, including those before 1904:
set theDate to (current date)
copy theDate to b
set b's month to January
set monthNum to (b - 2500000 - theDate) div -2500000
If you want a string with a leading zero where appropriate, you can add:
set monthNumStr to text 2 thru 3 of ((100 + monthNum) as string)
If you’re really in a hurry, you can mathematically combine the last two lines so that the whole process becomes:
copy theDate to b
set b's month to January
set monthNumStr to text 2 thru 3 of ((b - 252500000 - theDate) div -2500000) as string)
The above gets the month number directly from the date, which I think is what you wanted. However, if you just have a month whose number you want to know, you can convert it to a date first and get the number from that:
set myMonth to March
set theDate to date (myMonth as string) -- 1st of myMonth in current year
copy theDate to b
set b's month to January
set monthNumStr to text 2 thru 3 of (((b - 252500000 - theDate) div -2500000) as string)
--> "03"