Hi,

I am having the hardest time converting a date to epoch time. I even tried using datedif to get the difference in days so that I can just multiply it out to get seconds but the results I am getting are completely wrong.

My datedif code looks like this:

DATEDIF(19700101,20120423,'D').

Shouldn't that return me the differnce in days? But what it seems to be doing is just giving me the difference between the numbers. What could I be doing wrong here? I am probably missing something completely obvious.

If anyone can help me convert a date to epoch time or help me understand why my DATEDIF function isn't working. I would appreciate it.

Thanks ahead of time.
-Prince

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Prince Joseph,

Try putting single quotes around your dates so DATEDIF knows you are providing dates instead of numbers. If you use date-time values instead, you can use function HDIFF to calculate the number of seconds between the two values.

Thanks for the help. I'll definitely try this.

You're going to run into DST and time zone offset problems with that approach, as timestamps are based in UTC (no DST), while your local time zone probably does do DST and has an offset.

I dealt with a similar issue in this post: http://forums.informationbuild...1057331/m/4487079816

Apparently there's no way in WebFOCUS to calculate the offset you need, but it's possible to ask a database you're connecting to (doesn't even matter much which one).

It suffices to figure out the offset between a date in your local time zone (DST or not) and the same date in GMT.

Thanks for the help guys. I was able to finally figure it out. We have a method in place to get the offset time.