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Liberty BASIC Help Online

DATE$( )

Description:

Instead of adopting the date$ variable from QBasic, Liberty BASIC uses a function instead. This approach gives some additional flexibility. Unless otherwise indicated, the function returns today's date in the format specified. See also TIME$( ), Date and Time Functions

Usage:

'This form of date$() produces this format

print date$() ' Nov 30, 1999

print date$("mm/dd/yyyy") ' 11/30/1999

print date$("mm/dd/yy") ' 11/30/99

print date$("yyyy/mm/dd") ' 1999/11/30 for sorting

print date$("days") ' 36127 days since Jan 1, 1901

print date$("4/1/2002") ' 36980 days since Jan 1, 1901 for given date

print date$(36980) ' 04/01/2002 mm/dd/yyyy string returned

' when given days since Jan 1, 1901

You can assign a variable to the result:

d$ = date$( )

NOTE: All the above forms return a string except for date$("days"), and date$("4/1/02")

Using the date$("4/1/02") function:

This function returns the number of days since Jan 1, 1901 for the given date. Any of the following formats are acceptable. Please notice that if the first two digits of the year are omitted, 20xx is assumed.

'some examples

print date$("4/1/02") 'this assumes 4/1/2002

print date$("1/1/1901")

print date$("April 1, 2002")

print date$("Apr 1, 2002")

Here is a small program that demonstrates the last two implementations of the date$ function. It determines the number of shopping days until the holiday season:

today = date$("days")

target = date$("12/25/2003") 'subsititute current year and desired holiday

print "Shopping days left: ";

print target - today