Date/Time format

I have imported numeric date/time data from a third party logging system as DP wave. The numeric values look like:

print/D Date_time[0]
  44244.4666145602

The data was recorded on Feb. 17th 2021, so it doesn't seem to be the year-1904 based encoding system. I played with table formatting and Secs2Date/Secs2Time but I didn't get the expected date-time values. Throwing the same numeric data into a spreadsheet program and changing the display format, however, gives the recording time.

I'm sure I'm missing something obvious, maybe someone can point me in the right direction!

Thanks!

I think I read somewhere that Excel on a Mac uses 1st Jan 1904 as the origin date, but on Windows it is Dec 1899.

That is Excel time, if you want it in Igor time you need to do something like:

timewave=(timewave * 86400)-(date2secs(1908,1,2)) // convert to seconds, correct for Igor epoch
SetScale/P x 0,1,"dat", timewave
SetScale d 0,0,"dat", timewave

// example
print secs2date((44244.4666145602 * 86400) -(date2secs(1908,1,2)) ,0), secs2time((44244.4666145602 * 86400) -(date2secs(1908,1,2)) ,0)

  17/02/2021 11:11

 

Hi Kurt

thanks for the hint, your are right! I finally found the documentation of the format:

"Single, floating-point number. The integer part is the number of days since 31st Dec 1899, the decimal part is the proportion of the day since mid- night. For example, Noon on the 1st Jan 1900 would be represented by a value of 1.5, whilst a value of 34121.25 would represent the 6 am on the 1st June 1993."

I guess there are no simple built-in tools for conversion. Unfortunately I want to synchronise these data with some other from another logging system (string-based timestamp). 

@cpr:

Awesome, that gives the actual recording time, although I'm still puzzled by the different reference dates, i.e. 1899 vs. 1908 vs. 1904.

Thanks a lot!

@ChrLie

1908 is there in there code not for any special reason other than 1900 wasn't a leap year and 4 years away from 1904 without having to deal with century years when you're tired!