Hi. I'm trying to extract some data from an old BTrieve system.
The system stored its files as .M files (on DOS).
I've used butil -recover to get these into a plain(ish) text
file, but I'm having a problem with dates.
It seems to store the dates as a four-byte format of some
sort but it's not one I've seen before.

As an example, '01/01/97' is stored as:
02 69 04 80 (decimal)

and '01/07/89' is stored as:
02 68 119 09 (decimal)

Any ideas? I'm guessing it's a number of hours/days/something
since some offset but I'm not sure.

Thanks,

Jim
--
Find me at http://www.ursaMinorBeta.co.uk
"Brace yourself, this might make your eyes water."

Why not enter a new date into the system, see what it places there.
Then, change the date by one day, see what shows up, and keep repeating
until you see the pattern. Trying to figure it out with values
differing by around 8 years will be pretty tough.

By the way, if it is using an integer offset, then you should put the
hex bytes into the Windows calculator in little-endian order to get the
proper value.
Goldstar Software Inc.
Building on Btrieve(R) for the Future(SM)
Bill Bach
BillBach (AT) goldstarsoftware (DOT) com
http://www.goldstarsoftware.com
*** Chicago: Pervasive.SQL Service & Support - July 19-22 ***
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Jim wrote:

In article <d3e03o$ss9 (AT) dispatch (DOT) concentric.net>, Bill Bach wrote:
Sadly I don't have access to the original system, just the data files.
I'm not so sure it's an integer offset anymore - I took two dates that
I know are 6months apart but the difference was something like 453.

Weird one.

Jim
--
Find me at http://www.ursaMinorBeta.co.uk
"Brace yourself, this might make your eyes water."

If you need to build DDF files for your existing database you can
download BtSearch32 at www.nssdd.com. It will help you analyze the
data such as dates and build the DDF files. Once built then you can
use it to export to dbase or ascii.

Gil

Jim wrote:

Well, if it's not a Btrieve Date, and it's not a number, perhaps it is
an encoded date? Maybe they use 5 bits for the day, 4 bites for the
month, and the remainder for the year? See if that joves with
anything...

Jim wrote: