Saturday
Jan042014
Formatting short dates in AppleScript

I was updating some AppleScripts that need the current date as a string in my preferred format (YYYY-MM-DD
). The way I've typically done this is to paste the following function in and call it:
on todayISOformat()
set theDate to current date
set y to text -4 thru -1 of ("0000" & (year of theDate))
set m to text -2 thru -1 of ("00" & ((month of theDate) as integer))
set d to text -2 thru -1 of ("00" & (day of theDate))
return y & "-" & m & "-" & d
end todayISOformat
For quick and dirty scripts that are only going to run on your own computer I realized there's a cleaner way to get it: reset your system's standard for the format of Short Date to be YYYY-MM-DD
(vs. the default MM/DD/YY
) and then in AppleScript call:
short date string of (get current date)

in
AppleScript,
Work flow

