DBASE datetime

[GuntherVB]

I don't have a lot of experience with DBASE .dbf files, but I recently got a file from someone who asked what format the datetime column of his file was in..

F_DATETIME
)ZMHiu
)ZMHiu
)ZMHiu
)ZMHjn
)ZMHjn
)ZMHjn

The type of the field is varchar(6), so maybe the creator of the db is using his own twisted datetime format, but I don't know for sure.. maybe you guys could help

Thanx!

 

[tviman]

Varchar means "variable length character". The format you show is not a "date" format per se.

There's always a better way. The fun is trying to find it!

 

[GuntherVB]

I knew that, but I'm trying to find out what the creators of the db used as a format for the f_datetime field, if it isn't a standard format in dbase.

The letters seem to increment, so there must be some quind of logic in it.

 

[tviman]

It might be "Zulu" time - but I don't know how Zulu time is figured.

There's always a better way. The fun is trying to find it!

 

[GuntherVB]

)ZMHjn
)ZMHjn
)ZMHjn

Weird that there are three identical entries.. Unless they had been inserted at exactly the same time, they should show some difference..
Maybe it's only a date :-/

It's starting to look more like decoding .. lol

If anyone should recognize it, I'm all ears

 

[dbMark]

It would be nice to know what values those display as in the program. We need a Rosetta stone (an Egyptian hieroglyphics tablet found 200 years ago with a parallel Greek inscription which helped decode that dead language). There are 31,536,000 seconds in a 365-day year. If this datetime field ignores the seconds there are 525,600 minutes.

Looking at this data it seems to be mostly uppercase and lower case alphabet characters. Ignoring the fact that the values 2 to 4 are 3 upper case and the last 2 are lower case, since they may not always be that, if we assume (26x2)^5 which is just over 380 million possible combinations. And I still don't know what to make of the first character ")". Without knowing the rules, this is pure guesswork.