[Pythonmac-SIG] Apple Events

[John W Baxter]

Dan Green enquires:

>Does anybody know how to convert apple event types of "ldt" to a proper date
>value? Whenever I capture said value in a python script I get a value of
>
>Unknown('ltd', '\000\000\000\000\265\034\246\343') or something similar.
>
>Dates on a Mac should be # of seconds since 1980 sometime, no?
>
>--
>Dan Green           | "So What? It's your problem to learn to live with,

'ldt ' (note the trailing space) is the type used by AppleScript (and
probably others) for the Macintosh long date type, which is a 64-bit signed
number of seconds since the midnight at the beginning of January 1, 1904.

It can be easily represented in C in one of the ways the Apple headers do
it:  an unsigned long low longword and a signed long high longword.

Sorry, but I haven't tried dealing with it in Python...I suppose a C
extension could fabricate a suitable Python long integer.

Hint:  in the range 1904 through early 2040, the high four bytes are
zero...after sometime in 1972, the low four bytes are a negative number
when considered as signed (which the Mac headers tend to do for the old 4
byte date type given the Pascal heritage).

  --John  (sending just to the list, after having accidentally sent just to
Mr Green)

-- 
John Baxter   jwblist@olympus.net      Port Ludlow, WA, USA