>>>Hi,
>>>
>>>As I go through my program, I see many places where I convert a string to date, using CTOD(), hard-coded with MM/DD/YYYY. But if the date is (for example), British ("DD/MM/YYYY") it won't work.
>>>
>>>How do you suggest I change all places that use CTOD() from hard-coded use of American date system to another?
>>>
>>>TIA
>>
>>If I had to do this task, I would write a program to scan through every PRG, VCX, SCX, FRX, wherever there was code, and identify all of the expressions with CTOD() and replace them with my_ctod(), and then add FUNCTION my_ctod to my utility.prg or main.prg, whatever is in the SET PROCEDURE TO path.
>>
>>The my_ctod() function would take the incoming form in the MM/DD/YYYY and you could translate it on-the-fly and return the value. Something like this (untested, off the top of my head):
>>
>>

* Note:  tcDate is MM/DD/YYYY
>>FUNCTION my_ctod
>>LPARAMETERS tcDate
>>LOCAL lnMm, lnDd, lnYyyy
>>
>>    lnMm = INT(VAL(GETWORDNUM(tcDate, 1, "/")))
>>    lnDd = INT(VAL(GETWORDNUM(tcDate, 2, "/")))
>>    lnYyyy = INT(VAL(GETWORDNUM(tcDate, 3, "/")))
>>
>>    * Compute date in a standard form
>>    RETURN DATE(lnYyyy + IIF(lnYyyy < 100, INT(YEAR(DATE()) / 1000) * 1000, 0), lnMm, lnDd)

>>
>>Something like that.
>
>Thank you. This sounds like a very good approach.

I should point out that with GoFish, it shouldn't be very hard to simply change all those CTOD() calls to DATE() calls. You just write a little code to parse the CTOD() call to get the parameters and then create the corresponding DATE() call. Then you avoid all the workarounds.

Tamar