Date Format for date based items

TaskPaper
1

I’m having a little trouble with the date format in searches. Can you please clarify what format TP is working to? ie YMD etc.

Will there be date format localisations so I could use DMY as all sane people do :wink: ?

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2

Date based searches are a bit of a moving target right now.

In TaskPaper 2 there was no such thing… everything was string based. That’s one of the big reasons for formatting dates as YYYY/MM/DD so that compare operators in the query syntax work correctly on them.

In TaskPaper 3 the default is also string based searches. But in TaskPaper 3 you also have the option to do real date based searching. To do that use the date modifier ([d]) after any comparison operator. Here’s an example:

@start <[d] today

Since the [d] follows the < before the comparison is done both sides are first translated into dates. And here’s where we hit the moving target. The current translation is to:

  1. convert tomorrow to the start of tomorrow.
  2. convert today to the start of today.
  3. or return a date using the built in Date.parse(value).

Problem is I don’t know the details of Date.parse(value) except I think it’s not cross platform and I know it doesn’t support relative dates. More detail on the formats that it takes may be found here.

I’m still deciding on what date based formats I’ll support in the end.

3

Many thanks. This works. I should add that dates are syntactically formatted (2015-11-21) as opposed to (2015/11/21).

4

One advantage of entering dates in the simplified ISO pattern like:

@due(2015-12-14)
@start(2015-12-11)
@alert(2016-07-14 14:00)

is, of course, that date strings like these behave well in text-based sorting.

One approach is to use TextExpander to convert informal and relative date and time phrases into this format:

TextExpanderInformalDates.zip (57.7 KB)

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5

I’m still deciding on what date based formats I’ll support in the end.

@jessegrosjean I am just starting to play with using dates in TaskPaper. This last post was close to a year ago. Any progress or updated comments on where you have gone with this?

6

TaskPaper’s date and time formats are described in Dates section of the TaskPaper User’s Guide.

7

Yes, thanks, I know. My question was directed at a specific comment that Jessie made that this was still a moving target. I wanted to ask if anything had changed in his setting up dates.

8

The above discussion is resolved and no longer a moving target, TaskPaper now supports a pretty well defined set of date and relative date formats as described here:

https://guide.taskpaper.com/reference/dates/

And in a few other places in the users guide.

9

OK, thanks.