Applescript transform date format

applescripttime

I'm using this to transform my date from a DD/MM/YYYY to MM/DD/YYYY

set today to short date string of (current date)
set t to (time string of (current date))
set [_day, _month, _year] to [day, month, year] of date today

set _month to _month * 1 --> 3
set _month to text -1 thru -2 of ("0" & _month) --> "03"
set the text item delimiters to "/"
set today to {_month, _day, _year} as string
set fullDateToday to today & " " & t as string

e.g 04/20/2019 > 11/15/18

Although how can I transform the year in YY instead of YYYY ?

Best Answer

NOTE: I took what was described in a comment and converted it to an answer for completeness on this Q&A.

To convert the date so that the year is in YY format vs. YYYY format you could use this line to set _year.

set _year to text -1 thru -2 of ("0" & _year)

Example

Here's a full example of the your AppleScript snippet:

$ cat showdate.sh
#!/bin/bash

osascript <<END
set today to short date string of (current date)
set t to (time string of (current date))
set [_day, _month, _year] to [day, month, year] of date today

set _month to _month * 1 --> 3
set _month to text -1 thru -2 of ("0" & _month) --> "03"
set _year to text -1 thru -2 of ("0" & _year)
set the text item delimiters to "/"
set today to {_month, _day, _year} as string
set fullDateToday to today & " " & t as string
END

And when it's executed we get the following.

Today's date

$ date
Sun Apr 21 00:21:08 EDT 2019

via AppleScript

$ ./showdate.sh
04/21/19 00:20:45

How it works

This AppleScript line:

set _year to text -1 thru -2 of ("0" & _year)

When executed, will set the variable _year to the last 2 digits of the contents of _year prior vale. So if the value was 2019, the above line would result in _year being 19.

("0" & _year) - converts _year's contents to a string by prefixing a 0 to the beginning
-1 thru -2 of ... - will slice the last 2 digits from _year, and remove everything else from _year
-1 starts indexing from the right instead of the left

References

Index » unScripted » Dates & Times in AppleScripts

Related Solutions

Date calculation in AppleScript. Week numbers and their start date

Thanks to @ryan-m's comment I found a solution. Turns out date(1) is actually really cool. Its ability to do "adjustments" were the answer.

You can tell date to simply "go to" a specific day by using -v. You can then use plus and minus to "adjust" that date in another -v. So for instance:

date -v 1w -v 16y

Will go to the first month of 2016. (Or a date that contains that date)

With an adjustment we can walk through dates:

date -v +1w -v +0d -v 16y
date -v +1w -v +6d -v 16y

This goes to the first week of 2016. The second command goes from the beginning of that first week 6 days ahead. This is the 10th of January 2016. -v +2w would be the second week, and so forth. It's apparent which part can be automated here.

Everything that +'string' at the end does is it formats the date you're at in the way you want it displayed. I use this in my script to make a date-string that AppleScript's date command understands. Please don't confuse the shell command date(1) with the AppleScript date command.

This is the script I ended up with, by the way:

repeat with weekNumber from 1 to 52
    set weekStartShell to (do shell script "date -v +" & weekNumber & "w -v +0d -v 16y +'%d. %m. %Y'")
    set weekStart to date weekStartShell
    set weekEndShell to do shell script "date -v +" & weekNumber & "w -v +6d -v 16y +'%d. %m. %Y'"
    set weekEnd to date (weekEndShell & " 23:59:59")
    set projectName to (("CW" & weekNumber & ": " & weekStartShell & " - " & weekEndShell) as string)

    tell application "OmniFocus"
        tell folder "Day Projects" of default document
            set projectWeek to make new project with properties {name:projectName, defer date:weekStart, due date:weekEnd, singleton action holder:true}

        end tell
    end tell

end repeat

Note that in order to use AppleScript's set var to date "date-string" you have to give it a string in your locale. In Europe the string is 01. 02. 2016 23:59:59. In America this probably is something like 2016/02/01 23:59:59. You need to modify these in the variables in the script. (+'%Y/%m/%d' at the end)

MacOS – How to replace a folder that’s name is a date i.e. YYYYMMDD with folder hierarchy of year, month, date

Assuming all these YYYYMMDD folders are part of the same parent directory you could run

cd PARENT_DIRECTORY
for d in */; do
    [[ $d =~ [0-9]{8}/ ]] || continue
    mkdir -p -- "${d:0:4}/${d:4:2}"
    mv -- "$d" "${d:0:4}/${d:4:2}/${d:6:2}"
done

The for d in */; do loop reads all directory entries, the trailing / ensures that only directory names actually match
[[ $d =~ [0-9]{8}/ ]] tests whether the current entry consists of 8 digits, and continues with the next entry if not
${d:0:4}/${d:4:2}/${d:6:2} uses parameter expansion within bash to create a string containing the new path
The -- in both mkdir and mv prevents problem in case the directory or file name starts with a -. This can't happen here but it's probably good practice anyway.

Thanks to @terdon and @user3439894 for ideas on how to improve the original script.