Timothy Miller wrote:
I just did quite a bit of haphazard troubleshooting. I isolated the
problem. The short dates are all preceded by a spacebar character.
If I remove the spacebar characters, the sort works correctly. This
is easily reproduced. It doesn't seem to matter whether items,
lines or words are being sorted.
<snip>
This seems like a flaw in the way Rev interprets certain dates,
under certain circumstances.
Comments?
[EMAIL PROTECTED] replied:
It's correct behavior, based on the way that Rev calculates variable
types automatically. Dates are composed of numbers and a date
delimiter (usually "/" in the US). When the sort command sees a list
of dates that are well formatted, it sorts them as expected.
That's a pretty smart engine.
But if there is a leading space, the engine interprets it as an
ascii string instead -- since there are not suppoed to be spaces in
dates -- and you get an alpha-numeric sort.
Okay, that seems more or less consistent with what is happening.
OTOH, I'm not sure this explains why "<space>4/19/05" would convert
to a negative number of seconds, assuming the date in question is one
in a well-formatted sequence of dates.
But I don't need to understand that. The main thing is that it's not
a bug that RR should fix.
If there is a bug at all, it is in the fact that Rev returns "true"
if you ask it whether " 1/1/11" is a date. So it is smart about "is
a date" but doesn't apply the same filtering to the sort routine.
I'm not sure I'd exactly call this a bug as much as an inconsistency.
Understood. This kind of inconsistency might be the price the user
pays for RR's flexibility when it comes to reporting, converting and
interpreting dates and times.
This "gotcha" should be documented, though.
You could fix your sort command this way:
sort lines of cd fld "shedule.2" datetime by word 1 of item 2 of each
Good idea. I wouldn't have thought of that.
Thanks to you and Jim, too, for your assistance.
Tim
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