Saturday, February 7, 2009

Difference between two stardates

As promised last week, I rejigged my code to calculate the difference between two stardates into a proper function and translated it to ASP. I don't have access to an IIS server right now, so I didn't have a chance to test the ASP version yet, but I'm fairly confident that it works. Let me know if it doesn't!

I won't post the source code directly into this post like I usually do, but as usual it will be available on Snipplr. Expect to see this happen more often in the future. However, I'll talk briefly about what's going on under the hood.

The incoming stardates are just strings, and we split them up based on the official format: first two characters to calculate the years, next three characters to calculate the days, and last character to calculate the hours. The order of the stardates is not important - the code checks which is larger. The same magic numbers from last week are used to get the real values, which are then subtracted. After rounding off any decimal places, the three values are formatted into a human-readable string and returned. It should be very straight-forward.

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