Reputation:
I want to use Emacs Lisp to perform math operations like add and difference on dates and times.
Upvotes: 11
Views: 4998
Reputation: 7393
The short answer is: read the System Interface section of the elisp info manual. More specifically, the time sections:
The longer answer:
Emacs can work with time values as strings, floats, or a tuple of two or three integers. E.g. call some functions in the *scratch*
buffer:
(current-time)
(19689 59702 984160)
(current-time-string)
"Sun Nov 21 20:54:22 2010"
(current-time-zone)
(-25200 "MST")
(float-time)
1290398079.965001
Let's some conversions:
(decode-time (current-time))
(33 7 21 21 11 2010 0 nil -25200)
(decode-time) ; (current-time) by default
(51 7 21 21 11 2010 0 nil -25200)
(let ((seconds 36)
(minutes 10)
(hour 21)
(day 21)
(month 11)
(year 2010))
(encode-time seconds minutes hour day month year))
(19689 60732)
(format-time-string "%A %e %B" (current-time))
"Sunday 21 November"
(seconds-to-time 23)
(0 23 0)
(time-to-seconds (current-time))
1290399309.598342
(time-to-days (current-time))
734097
Finally, to answer your question:
(time-add (current-time) (seconds-to-time 23))
(19689 60954 497526)
(time-subtract (current-time) (seconds-to-time 45))
(19689 61001 736330)
Upvotes: 23