Using os.date and os.time

General
1

I am trying to take the hour and minute in the day and assign a value to a variable according to the time of day. As of right now I am recording the time as follows.

time = os.date("%I"..":".."%M".." ".."%p")

Obviously I can’t compare a string to a number i.e. If os.date(“%I”) > 8 then , so I was wondering how I could accomplish my goal. Also, I’m a little confused in how os.time works so I thought I’d throw that in here for anyone who would like to explain it to me.

2

this kind of basic question are easy to find with google. try it. First link:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9560142/lua-date-format-and-comparison

3

@Jmv I know it is pretty basic, but I did look it up on google first and 1. I couldn’t find anything specifically aimed at my question (this wasn’t exactly what I was going for, but after re-reading the page a couple of times, I think I know what to do now) and 2. I thought it would be good to start a thread on it in codea so people could just search the forum as that’s where I usually look first.

4

@Staples Here’s an example of using os.date. The for loop shows the variables that are returned. The other print statements show how to use them individually.


function setup()
    d=os.date("*t")
    for a,b in pairs(d) do
        print(a,b)
    end
    
    print()
    print("the hour is ",d.hour)
    print("the minute is ",d.min)
end
5

You can compare a string to a number if the string contains just a number. Try using tonumber(os.date("%l"))

6

@dave1707 @SkyTheCoder Thanks, I’ve figured out how to do what I was trying to do!