Get current UTC and Unix Time values from the Internet...

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I was toying with the idea of generating a unique index for a database table and I didn't like the fact that GUID encodes the local PC's MAC address.

It seemed sufficient to get a value based on Universal time or Zulu or Greenwich or UTC or whatever you want to call it.  As long as anyone in the world, independant of their time zone or local clocks, can confidently generate a unique index.

Here is a way I found to retrieve the coordinated universal time (UTC).  There could very well be a more direct method.

I search for an API and found out the rabbit hole goes quite far down.  Suffice to say: "complicated" is not what I'm looking for.

Demo Get UTC via inet.G32 (8.45 KB)

With this demo I am accesing the text file return by the following URL and extracting the UTC and Unix Time from the downloaded text file.

worldtimeapi.org/api/timezone/Europe/London.txt

I suppose if GFA had a JSON parser... we could chew on this output:  worldtimeapi.org/api/timezone/Europe/London

And spit out the information we need.

See following post.

Attachments:

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This demo gets the UTC from a JSON file.

Demo Get UTC from JSON file.G32 (9.91 KB)

This url returns a JSON file: worldtimeapi.org/api/timezone/Europe/London

I cannot guarantee my method can parse all JSON data, but, for this case it seems to work.

The advantage of doing it this way is that, now, all item values can easily be accessed by name via a Hash table.

If you didn't know Hash tables existed, and worked with computers long enough, you would no doubt invent them, thinking they are the greatest thing since sliced bread! 

From GFA HELP:

A Hash is a one dimensioned 'array' and its index is a string. A Hash table has no size, just a number of elements. For Example, with Dim ht As Hash Int declares a dynamic table (array) ht of type Int, which has initially no elements.

Type specifies the data type of the values to be stored in the hash table. Type may be Byte, Boolean, Card, Short, Word, Integer, Long, Large, Currency, Single, Double, Date, String (variable-length strings only) and Variant.

A hash table supports the creation, storage, and retrieval of key/value pairs in memory. The hash table maps string keys to values; the index for hash tables is a string. When the type of the hash table is String, the hash table acts as a dictionary (string/string pair).

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This post shows how to get UTC and Unix Time from another site: www.utctime.net/

gb32.proboards.com/post/3075/