String format effective way

I am wondering if there is a more effective way of parsing a format string and replacing parts of the string with values. For example

"T: $H:$M:$S" should be replaced by hours, minutes seconds. But the string should be variable, it could only be $S or $M:$s or $H:$M .... (lowercase means no leading zero).

I tried to use Lang.format, but it doesn't really make it easier to replace the $M with $1$ etc, because the order is not fixed.

The way I am currently doing it, is going through the whole string and searching for the strings to replace (1 by 1).

var sec = Math.floor(val).toNumber();
var min = Math.floor(sec.toFloat()/60.0).toNumber();
var hr  = Math.floor(min.toFloat()/60.0).toNumber();
sec = sec%60;

for(var i = 0; i < fmttext.length(); i++) {
	var part = fmttext.substring(i, i+2);
	...
    if(part.equals("$H") || part.equals("$h")) {
		newtext += hr.format("%" + (part.equals("$H") ? "02" : "") + "d").toString();
		i++;
	} else {
		newtext += fmttext.substring(i, i+1);
	}
	...
}

The string.format function does not take any other characters as the one to replace, so that would make it much easier.

Thanks for any help!

regards

Erich

0 jim_m_58 over 5 years ago

Instead of making this general purpos, why not make it a function where you pass a parameter as to what you want?

In one of my functions, I do this, which might be another option: Return mm:ss, if Hr is 0, or hh:mm:ss

//
	function toHMS(secs) {
    	var hr = secs/3600;
    	var min = (secs-(hr*3600))/60;
    	var sec = secs%60;
   		var ret=min.format("%02d")+":"+sec.format("%02d");
   		if(hr!=0) {ret=hr.format("%d")+":"+ret;}
   		return ret;
    }

0 Travis.ConnectIQ over 5 years ago

I think I understand what you're getting at, and I think you can still solve this with String.format(). If you pass all of the possible tokens in the input parameters array, you can supply a different format string to get the various formats. Consider this

var H = val / 3600;
var M = val % 3600 / 60
var S = val % 60;

// $1$ is $H
// $2$ is $M
// $3$ is $S

// if you want T: $H:$M:$S..
fmt = "T: $1$:$2$:$3$";

// if you want $S
fmt = "T: $3$";

// if you want $H:$M
fmt = "T: $1$:$2$";

var s = Lang.format(fmt, [ H, M, S ]);

If you really must have strftime style formatting, feel free to have this code that I wrote a long time ago. It could probably be done more efficiently now with String.toUtf8Array and StringUtils.utf8ArrayToString, but that is an exercise for the reader...

Sorry, I had to link to the file in my onedrive account because the forum software won't let me paste the source here.

1drv.ms/.../s!Ak71bikqehCh2xsVUKbba9gREnuH

0 hundsmiachn over 5 years ago in reply to Travis.ConnectIQ

Thanks for the code, I will take a look into that!

regards

Erich