dates and times

Purpose

The aim here is to parse your file-names identifying suitable textual file dates and times, where you have incorporated something suitable in the file-name. Suitable dates can be re-used by saving file-choices as favourites.

Mask Syntax

The procedure reads any file-names in the Folder to process (and optionally its sub-folders) and attempts to parse them. If an indicator is found it will record a suitable date combination.

Suitable indicators of textual date are

YY or YYYY        year, two or four digits (YY=a 20th Century date)

MM                month

DD                        day

*                        skip all characters until a digit is found

The procedure doesn't understand words such as "December" or "Five", it only uses digits. Any character other than Y,M,D,* in the mask simply gets ignored.

Output

The program will always add each entry found to a simple text file (File for list of dates) listing its file-name and adding a suitable date as expected in the auto-date procedure, (or <no date found> if the mask didn't match a valid date). In addition, where the result is 1st January 1980 or later, it will set the file's time and date in the operating system to the date as parsed, so that WordSmith will automatically match the date of the text contents to the date stored on disk.

When all files have been processed, the program opens the list of files in Notepad or equivalent. Use it afterwards in the auto-date procedure within file-choosing and save your preferred text files as favourites.

Examples