S2 Cookbook: Dates

The two classes involved with dates are Date, which represents a date, and DateTime, which represents both a date and time.

Getting the current date or time

The function you use for this is journal_current_datetime(), which returns the current DateTime in the timezone of the journal being viewed.

# Get both the date and the time
var DateTime current_datetime = journal_current_datetime();
# Because DateTime is a child class of Date, you can also get
# just the date by casting 
var Date current_date = journal_current_datetime() as Date;

Alternatively, use the local_time or time variables inside of the current Page:

# Get the current page
Page p = get_page();
# Get the time according to the journal's timezone
var DateTime local_datetime = p->local_time();
# Get the GMT time
var DateTime gmt_datetime = p->time():

Getting the day of the week

The Date and DateTime classes both have a function called day_of_week. It returns an integer between 1 and 7, where Sunday starts at 1 and Saturday ends at 7. You can then get the name of the day from one of several properties:

• lang_dayname_long -- Array containing the long name of the day: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday
• lang_dayname_short -- Array containing day abbreviations: Sun, Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri, Sat
• lang_dayname_shorter -- Array containing day letters: S, M, T, W, T, F, S

# We'll use the current time as our DateTime class
var DateTime current_datetime = journal_current_datetime();
# Get our day of the week number
var int weekday = $current_datetime->day_of_week();
# Get all of the possible week day labels, using our day of the week number
var string full_dayname = $*lang_dayname_long[$weekday];
var string short_dayname = $*lang_dayname_short[$weekday];
var string letter_dayname = $*lang_dayname_shorter[$weekday];
# Example printing
print "Possible weekday labels: $full_dayname $short_dayname $letter_dayname";

If it was a Thursday, the above would print out:

Possible weekday labels: Thursday Thu T