Is There a Way to Add the Day of the Week to a Date?

Questions & Suggestions
2

Hey @ronald,

Yes...

While this is possible using Keyboard Maestro native actions, you have to live with a fixed date format (or detect between a variety of fixed formats).

AppleScript Data Detectors allow the user to be a little more lazy about the format of their original date string. These all work on my system:

jan 10 2023
10 jan 2023
10 jan 23
1/10/2023

There might be issues caused by system date settings if they are not U.S.

If you have any problems report back.

-Chris

Convert Selected Date String to a Given Format v1.00.kmmacros (9.8 KB)

Macro Image

Keyboard Maestro Export

4 Likes
3

If you're sure you will always use the "23 Jan 2023" format, there's a simpler (or at least shorter) way using the shell's date command.

Date with DOW.kmmacros (2.4 KB)

Show screenshot of macro

20230117-KM Date with DOW
20230117-KM Date with DOW916×1121 98.6 KB

The shell script is

date -j -f '%d %b %Y' '+%a %-d %b %Y' "$KMVAR_localDate"

I'm assuming you prefer output of "Thu 5 Jan 2023" over "Thu 05 Jan 2023." If you want the leading zero in the output, delete the hyphen in %-d. Either way, you don't need the leading zero in the input.

To get the kind of input flexibility @ccstone's solution provides, you could write a Perl one-liner that uses the Date::Parse library:

Date with DOW.kmmacros (2.2 KB)

Show screenshot of macro

20230117-KM Date with DOW
20230117-KM Date with DOW916×943 81.1 KB

Here, the shell script is

perl -MTime::Piece -MDate::Parse -nle '$ts=str2time($_); print localtime($ts)->strftime("%a %-d %b %Y")'

This is no better than @ccstone's AppleScript, just a different approach.

I think the key to both of our answers is that while Keyboard Maestro has excellent facilities for formatting dates, it has no built-in way to parse dates. You have to use some outside scripting utility to parse the date, and while you're there, you might as well format the date, too.

3 Likes
4

Hey Drang,

I don't like using date for this purpose simply because of the dependency upon a strict format, but it can be very useful as you say when dealing with said fixed format.

Love the Perl!  :sunglasses:

Would you mind providing a more formally written sample (i.e. not a one-liner)?

TIA.

-Chris

1 Like
5

@ccstone @drdrang
thanks very much !

1 Like
6

Are you actually doing the typing? If so you have total control over the format and this looks like a fine use case for a typed string trigger. So you could expand ;18012023; to "Wed 18 Jan 2023" with:

ddMMYYYY to Date stamp.kmmacros (2.5 KB)

Image

ddMMYYYY to Date stamp
ddMMYYYY to Date stamp1322×1446 144 KB

It's less versatile the either @ccstone's or @drdrang's solutions, but it does make it very easy to customise to what's natural to you for date entry. Perhaps you only ever enter dates in the 2000s and like / delimiters instead of padding the day and month -- strip the ;s and treat the remainder as an array. So you'd type ;18/1/23; and:

d-slash-M-slash-YY to Date stamp.kmmacros (3.0 KB)

Image

d-slash-M-slash-YY to Date stamp
d-slash-M-slash-YY to Date stamp1322×1632 247 KB

With a consistent data format and a little bit of text processing -- the world's your oyster!

3 Likes
7

Very interesting...

You are opening the pandora's box of macros triggered by strings which i ignored until now.

Thanks very much. I will play around with the concept.

1 Like
8

Be careful – typed-trigger macros are mostly for text-expansion and generally shouldn't be used outside of text fields/editors.

But they're useful as all get-out – I have almost 49,000 text expansions in Typinator – and quite a few in Keyboard Maestro where KM's features are needed.

I use them many times per day.

9

I have a few hundred in Typinator (49 K !!!), and was precisely working on a Typinator solution to avoid having 2 sources of expansion. thank you for the comment.

10

You do know that Typinator has its own date-expansion format, so you can do all kinds of expansions for the current date and/or time.

One of mine for instance: dt expands to 2023/01/17 14:13

In Typinator-speak it looks like this:

{YYYY}/{MM}/{DD} {h024}:{m}
1 Like
11

Yes, I use the exact same expansion.

The problem is what you write 6 Feb 2023 and want to add the day in which case I can search and replace with your macro that of @drdrang or use @Nige_S ' string method.

1 Like
12

Right. I use this technique all the time to convert various date formats to my preferred formats.

I made this easy to modify in the macro:

image

ICU Date/Time Format Syntax

1 Like
13

Thank you for the reference on ICU formatting!

14

It's in the Keyboard Maestro Editor Help menu if you lose the URL – as is the ICU regular expression syntax guide.

1 Like
15

Thank you

16

Laid out in a more script-like form, and not relying on command-line switches, it would be this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use Time::Piece;
use Date::Parse;

my $dateString = <STDIN>;
chomp $dateString;
my $timeStamp = str2time($dateString);
print localtime($timeStamp)->strftime("%a %-d %b %Y");
4 Likes
17

Ignoring the question, I have several short text macros that give the following formats

27/01/2023 21:50:15 << email date stamp
20230127 2150 <<quick filename append for version control

%ICUDateTime%ddMMMyyyy HH:mm EEE% <<Used for diary/log entries

Quick Checkpoint for file name
CKP %ICUDateTime%yyyyMMdd HHmmss%

This one also has a time offset (no allowance for summertime etc)
%ICUDateTime%EEEddMMMyyyy HH:mm%UK [and %ICUDateTimeMinus%6%Hours%EEE HH:mm% in Belize]
used for many emails to Belize.

Hope this helps..... 27Jan2023 21:57 Fri

18

How do you find them?

I am still staggered by that number. I have maybe 35.

Really how does it work for you? Are they systematic in some way and complete pieces of code?

That is my guess.

19

:sunglasses:

Typinator has a very sophisticated Quick-Search mechanism.

Categories can be globally available to search, or you can designate a label that's required to search that category.

Here are my AppleScript handlers (subroutines) with a category label of “h” and text search of “BBEdit”:

image
image755×394 87.5 KB

  • I export these handler-calls from my AppleScript Libraries with a script that auto-numbers them.
  • The prefix (abbreviation) for the handler-calls I only use as a filter.
    • FLb.## means “Find Library” handler number ##.
    • GLb.## means “General Library” handler number ##.
    • NLb.## means “Net Library” handler number ##.

If I can't remember the handler name – but I know what library it's in I can use the library name in the filter to restrict to just that library and then start drilling down to what I'm looking for.

I have a good memory for abbreviations that I use regularly, and I use mnemonics to make them more memorable and also easy to figure out.

cs<space>	== Christopher Stone 		(must be lower case)
dt<space>	== 2023/01/27 19:11			(date/time)
ffd<space>	== 2023-01-27 › 19.12.46	(Finder Formated Date)
etc<space>	== etcetera 				(must be lower case)
etcc<space>	== Etcetera 				(extra c means capitalized)
km<space>	== Keyboard Maestro 		(must be lower case)
kmv<space>	== Keyboard Maestro 10.2	(script that computes the KM version)
mos<space>	== macOS	 				(must be lower case)
osv<space>	== macOS 10.14.6 			(script that computes the macOS version)

I punctuate anything that might need to be isolated from other strings:

c;<space>	== Chris 			(must be lower case)
pnt;<space>	== @Pending @Now 	(must be lower case)

A whole lot of my expansions are for use with Quick-Search only, so I don't have to remember much.

I have the TidBITS Auto-Correct library which is a pretty large collection.

I have all sorts of code snippets.

I use text-tags liberally when things are hard to find.

Etcetera.

How do I remember everything? The real answer is that I don't remember everything – I remember a great deal (especially those things I use regularly), and I've made things relatively easy to find if I forget.

The enormous utility of Quick-Search is the single biggest reason I switched to Typinator a decade or so ago.

Before that I used in order:

  • My own system driven by QuicKeys and AppleScript.
  • TypeIt4Me
  • TextExpander

I've also used a few different utilities on Windows, but it was 2009 (I think) when I last used a PC.

  • PhraseExpress was my favorite at the time (I think it's gotten ridiculously expensive since then.)
3 Likes
20

So kind of you to take that time Christopher. I will bookmark it. It is time I stretched a bit on my snippets.

1 Like
21

This one's very "me" but might give you some ideas.

I generally do dates/times in one of six different formats:

  • 28/01/2023 -- some internal forms
  • 28-01-2023 -- other internal forms (and yes, I wish they'd standardise!)
  • 28 Jan 2023 -- style guide for written dates
  • 2023-01-28T19:29:35+0000 -- work's "full ISO" timestamp
  • 2023-01-28T193012+0000 -- log-style timestamp
  • 2023-01-28193033+0000 -- old-style timestamp

...and use a typed string that is

  • ; -- because all* my text expansions start with that
  • // -- because FileMaker's "today" symbol is ingrained!
  • None or one of -ilou
  • ; -- because all* my text expansions finish with that

So ;//; expands to the default "28/01/2023", ;//u; to "28 Jan 2023", etc.

Date Entry.kmmacros (6.9 KB)

Image

Date Entry
Date Entry950×4344 237 KB

* "All" isn't very many because I don't often think to create them, and seldom remember to use them when I do! Seeing @ccstone's examples above makes me think I should try harder at both -- thanks for the push, Chris!

1 Like