Date and time tags

[Terry The Great]

This week AlexParker and a few months ago MichaelGiacomelli posted a description in the Wiki of all the tags to use for the WPS display. I ran some tests on the time and date tags they listed and I got these inconsistent results:

Tag     Description of output in the manual             The actual output that is displayed

%ce     Zero padded day of month from 1 to 31   Space padded to the left for digits 1 to 9

%ck     Hour from 0 to 23 (24 hour format)      Space padded to the left for digits 1 to 9

%cl     Hour from 1 to 12 (am/pm format)              Space padded to the left for digits 1 to 9

What is the reason for the space padding? If it were for alignment purposes then the user could simply use the existing alignment tags (%al, %ar, %ac). Or is it a bug? I would prefer that there not be any space padding.

Please respond to terrythegreat-1@hotmail.com

[chrisjj]

FYI: http://www.rockbox.org/tracker/task/7007

[saratoga]

Stop addressing questions to random people on the forums.  I have no idea about the WPS tags, and I certainly can't answer your question, so there is no reason to ask me specifically.  Just ask your question, and if anyone knows, they'll answer.   

[toehser]

I guess a workaround with %ss and a conditional could work for now.

[chrisjj]

Stop addressing questions to random people on the forums.

Saratoga, perhaps you missed that the addressees are not random people. As the post says, they are the authors of the relevant info.

[AlexP]

Saratoga, perhaps you missed that the addressees are not random people. As the post says, they are the authors of the relevant info.

Wrong, I haven't added or edited any information in the wiki in months.

Also, I'm definately not replying to a random email address, this is a forum.

[chrisjj]

> Wrong, I haven't added or edited any information in the wiki in months.

So he made simple a mistake.

[saratoga]

> Wrong, I haven't added or edited any information in the wiki in months.

So he made simple a mistake.

I've edited a few random posts addressed to me. I think he's under the impression that I am responsible for the entire Rockbox project rather than just the things I've worked on.

[AlexP]

> Wrong, I haven't added or edited any information in the wiki in months.

So he made simple a mistake.

Which when saratoga pointed out you tried to make out saratoga was wrong. Please think before posting.  This is the last word on the subject, if this thread doesn't get back on topic I'll lock it.

[JdGordon]

The reasoning for the spacing is because these tags are MUCH older than the current skinning abilities - namely viewports. So the only way you used to be able to align things was with the %a* tags. Having it a known width (for a given font) meant themers could make it look nice.

Is that needed now? probably not. Are we going to change it? Nope, its a minor detail and would break tags.
This is maybe a candidate for a "skin version" tag which we've (Me and Saint) talked about before where a tag at the start of the skin file would potentially change the behaviour of certain tags while not breaking backwaards compatibility.

[wodz]

Wouldn't it be better to simply reject skin designed for incompatible skin engine version instead of dragging all legacy stuff in skin engine?

[JdGordon]

well sometimes the change is tiny and supporting both (for some reasonable amount of time) would be pretty cheap.