Ezine 193 - Get-Date How Many Days to Christmas?
PowerShell's Get-Date Calculates 'How Many Days to Christmas'
Manipulating dates is always tricky. However, PowerShell's
get-Date cmdlet does a wonderful job of coping with the different
international formats for day / month / year. As a result, what
every your country, it will be easy to calculate how many days there are
to Christmas.
Topics for PowerShell Get-Date and DateTime
♣
Normally I like to use a learning progression where we begin by examining a
cmdlet's parameters with get-Help, and then we look at the properties by piping
the cmdlet into get-Member. Finally, we use this knowledge to create a
real-life script.
This week I am making a change to my usual running order. Firstly I
want to tackle the challenge presented by the real-life task first.
Secondly, I will encourage you to research more methods and properties for
the cmdlet get-date, thereby encouraging you to tackle other projects.
One more request, I am collecting handy PowerShell scripts, thus do send
me your real-life scripts in general and datetime scripts in particular.
Our challenge is simple enough, to knock-up a simple script which will
tell us how many days there are to Christmas, Thanksgiving or any other date
you care to place in a string.
Here in the UK, our operating system shows dates as dd mmmm yyyy.
Whereas in the United States your locale is displayed as mmmm dd yyyy. Consequently, I was amazed that
PowerShell could convert both "25 December 2009" and "November 26 2009" into
date formats that it could understand.
In this example I have used several non-essential variables, I just wanted to show
my thought process in creating this very simple PowerShell script.
# PowerShell Script to display days until Christmas
$DecDate = "25
December 2009"
$NovDate ="November 26 2009"
$Thanksgiving = [system.datetime]$NovDate
$Christmas = [system.datetime]$DecDate
$Today =get-date
$Xmas = ($Christmas.DayOfYear - $Today.DayOfYear)
$Thanks = ($Thanksgiving.DayOfYear
- $Today.DayOfYear)
"There are " + $Xmas + " days until " + $DecDate
"There are " + $Thanks + " days until " + $NovDate
Note 1: You may wish to examine the values for $DecDate
and $NovDate and then change the sequence of day month to suit
your culture.
Note 2: It's interesting to see how PowerShell leverages
.Net Framework, for example, it employs System.DateTime to convert a text
string to a date format.
Note 3: I keep marvelling that PowerShell could
understand both formats dd mmmm yyyy and mmmm dd yyyy.
Guy
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"There are " + (([system.datetime]"25 december 2009").DayOfYear -
`
(get-date).DayOfYear) + " days until " + "25 December 2009"
Note 1: This is just one long command. Observe
how the backtick (`) enables the command to overspill onto the second
line.
Note 2: This command needed an extra set of
round brackets to surround [system.datetime]"25 December 2009"
Note 3: It's interesting to see how PowerShell
interprets a mixture of "text strings" and date calculations. As with types of
bracket, you need the correct type of "double" speech marks here.
Further Research
I'm hoping that the simple example above will give you ideas for date
scripts, which will be useful in your PowerShell projects. If so, then it's
well worth examining get-Date's properties, and in particular its
methods.
# Research PowerShell's get-Date
get-Date | get-Member
#Also try
get-Help get-Date -full
Note 1: Normally it's a cmdlet's properties that I am most interested in,
but with get-date it's the methods that intrigue me, for example addDays
and IsDaylightSavingTime.
Note 2: As I mentioned earlier, I am
collecting real-life PowerShell scripts, thus do send me your datetime
scripts. If it's really simple then that will help newbies, if
it's more sophisticated than mine, then that will help people with a
similar task.
Once again, here is PowerShell working with the .Net Framework class
DateTime. ParseExact is a neat method which can convert a
text string into its DateTime equivalent.
# ParseExact Change date and time with custom specifier.
$DateString = "Sun 04 Oct 2009 12:30 AM -06:00"
$Format = "ddd dd MMM
yyyy h:mm tt zzz"
$Translate = [DateTime]::ParseExact($DateString,
$Format, $provider)
Write-Host "$DateString converts to $($result.ToString())."
Summary of PowerShell Get-Time and DateTime
Scripting dates is always tricky. In these examples we can see
how PowerShell leverages .Net Framework to convert strings into DateTime
values, which it can then use for calculations.
If you are looking for handy network utilities, try some of the free downloads at
Tools4Ever
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See more PowerShell examples for syntax advice
• PowerShell Tutorials • Syntax •
PowerShell functions •
Plist
•
Get-Date •
Quotes •
PowerShell variables •
RegEx
•
Conditional operators •
Hashtable •
Windows
PowerShell
Please email me if you have a better example script. Also please report any factual mistakes, grammatical errors or broken links, I will be happy to correct the fault.
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