Tag: tips

Iterate through each valid calendar days

Posted on by shiplu

If you develop software like me, you may face a scenario where you need to iterate through calendar days.  These are specially needed in event management application or any other application that has some sorts of daily tracker. The main point is you want to iterate through dates.

For example, If the current date is “February 28th 2001”, next date will be  “March 1st 2001”. Obviously not “February 29th 2001”. If the current date is “February 28th 2004”, next date will be “February 29th 2004”, Not “March 1st 2004”.  Yes, that’s quite tricky.  So how do you achieve it in programming?

The solution is to use time function families found in standard C header file time.h. The main idea is to first create the time you want to show by mktime(). This is the initial time. To advance to the next day/hour/min/sec/month just convert the resultant value of mktime() to struct tm structure by localtime() or gmtime(). Then add 1 day/hour/min/sec/month to struct tm structure. Use this structure to create time again by mktime().

The above strategy works because of the following lines from manual.

     In addition to computing the calendar time, mktime() normal-
     izes  the  supplied tm structure. The original values of the
     tm_wday and tm_yday components of the structure are ignored,
     and the original values of the other components are not res-
     tricted to the ranges indicated in  the  definition  of  the
     structure

Here is a sample code that iterates through the first 200 dates from epoch.

[code language=”c”]

#include <time.h>;
#include <stdio.h>;

int main(){
struct tm *lt;
int i=200;
time_t t=1; // first second on epoch

while(i–){
lt = localtime(&t);
printf("%s\n", asctime(lt));
lt->tm_hour+=24; // adding 1 day = 24 hours
t = mktime(lt);
}
return 0;
}

[/code]

If you are working with other language you may wonder if this will apply to your language. The good news is most language has wrapper for C routines.  May be the name is different. But  most probably you have it. Just see the manual.  Same technique will work on other language too.

HOWTO: Convert 6 digit css color code to 3 digit

Posted on by shiplu

Okay, So you want to convert 6 digit css color codes to 3 digit. They are almost same. But 3 digit helps to remember it.  Before jumping into code let me explain what does 3 digit represents. A css color #abc means #aabbcc. No its NOT  #a0b0c0. It may appear that  the second one is more appropriate. But the fact is Its not. You can test it.   See the following table.

#aabbcc #abc #a0b0c0
     

So to convert any 6 digit css color to a 3 digit color needs some calculation. Thats why I have written a php function.

See the code bellow

function convert_color($color){
 preg_match("|#([\da-h]{2})([\da-h]{2})([\da-h]{2})|", $color, $match);
 $n=array();
 array_shift($match);
 foreach($match as $m)
  array_push($n, reduce_digit($m));
 return "#". implode("", $n);
}

function reduce_digit($hex){
 $n = hexdec($hex);
 $r = $n%17 ;
 $d = intval($n/17)+ (($r<8)?0:1);
 return dechex($d);
}

Just call the convert_color function with 6 digit css color. For example. “#bcd465”. Here # is necessary. This will return the 3 digit css color.

If you want to test it, run the following code.

$params= array(
array("#aabbcc","#abc"),
array("#112233","#123"),
array("#456789","#468"),
array("#1234fa","#13f"),
array("#000000","#000")
);

foreach($params as $param){
    $f = convert_color($param[0]);
    $e = $param[1];
    echo "Passed={$param[0]}, Expected=", $e, ", Actual=";
    echo $f, ", Status=", (($e==$f)?"SUCCESS":"FAILED"), PHP_EOL;
}

I have run it it the result is good.

Passed=#aabbcc, Expected=#abc, Actual=#abc, Status=SUCCESS
Passed=#112233, Expected=#123, Actual=#123, Status=SUCCESS
Passed=#456789, Expected=#468, Actual=#468, Status=SUCCESS
Passed=#1234fa, Expected=#13f, Actual=#13f, Status=SUCCESS
Passed=#000000, Expected=#000, Actual=#000, Status=SUCCESS