Re: Is there a POSIX compliant way of turning a "HH:MM:SS" formatted string to seconds? ...
On Thu 17 Jul 2025 at 23:39:02 (+0200), lbrtchx@tutamail.com wrote:
> Video durations are formatted in youtube's .info.json files as "HH:MM:SS";
↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑
On Fri 18 Jul 2025 at 01:21:08 (+0200), lbrtchx@tutamail.com wrote:
> OK, the Math is right, but the assumptions made by date aren't smart. I "overtested" your one liner with the kinds of input you would grab using jq from youtube .info.json files and to my amazement, when you only have two semicolon separated values, the bash date utility assumes the first chunk to be the hours and the second the minutes!:
Times that are associated with dates, as in the date utility,
are times of day, and these have to include an hour value
in the range 0 through 24.
For times that are durations, there's no such rule, and
youtube's notation is just a sensible convention for measuring
videos. It would be useless for giving the reverberation time
of a concert hall, or the duration of a journey to Pluto.
> I still think that there should be a way to make what I need straight forward using date's own formatting.
Your starting point with date would be the /time/:
$ TZ=UTC date --date='@0' +'%s'
0
$
and then you would add /durations/ by using what is outlined
in the section headed 'Relative items in date strings' from:
$ info date
… …
However, I don't /think/ that date can syntactically handle a --date
argument of that complexity (mixing an absolute and relative time),
so using date at all is just a nasty hack.
Cheers,
David.
Reply to: