(no subject)

[chess]

Right.

I have a text file, with dates in American format - m(m)/d(d)/yyyy, so today is 2/15/2002. Amongst a lot of other stuff, and I'd like to keep all the otherstuff the same.
I need to make a nice stand-alone-executable program which will just swap the month and day bits of each date it comes across around. (they're all a certain number of tabs (with otherstuff between the tabs) after a newline, if that helps.) This is because Access refuses to parse American dates from linked text files if your Windows regional settings are set to UK.
Any help / ideas as to how I could get this done?

Comments

[marble.livejournal.com]

sed 's_\([0-9]\{1,2\}\)/\([0-9]\{1,2\}\)/\([0-9]\{4\}\)_\2/\1/\3_g' I think.

[dreema.livejournal.com]

yeek

marble talks in an alien language :)

[jaq.livejournal.com]

Perhaps you could make Access read that column as plaintext and write a VB function to convert it, then use it in a query with the date as a calculated field.

[chess]

Ooh. Now, if only I knew the first thing about VB, or Access in general...

[phlebas.livejournal.com]

Set your regional settings to US, start Access, open file, change settings?

[chess]

Sure, I'd do that if it was my computer, and I might end up doing that anyway (installing cygwin on the fileserver would be, uh, fun, Marble :) ). But this is the school's fileserver, and you can just about guarantee that somewhere down the line someone's going to go 'oh, this setting is wrong, let's change it', and then the print monitoring will mysteriously stop working...