In Yahoo Pipes, the Date Builder module converts a text string into a date-time value. You can use the drop-down calendar to select a date, type one in, or wire one in from another module like the Text Input module.
This module is useful when you need to extract items from a feed by date.
The Date Builder Module can even understand specifiers such as: tomorrow, yesterday or 5 minutes ago (check the Date Specifiers Chart at the end of this section for more).
One important thing to note is that the Date Builder Module runs off UTC time.
Definition: Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) is a time standard based on International Atomic Time with leap seconds added at irregular intervals to compensate for the Earth’s slowing rotation.
Yikes. You probably didn’t need that in depth of a definition for our purposes, but it’s important to note what time zone Yahoo Pipes operates off of so you can base your time and date calculations accordingly.
Lets try a quick example by selecting a date from the drop down calendar…
…and see what results we get in the Debugger pane:
As you can see above, our date of “March 8, 2010” is broken down into different attributes:
- Hour
- Timezone
- Second
- Month
- Minute
- Utime
- Day
- Day_of_week
- Year
Now all of those are self explanatory except utime. Utime is the number of seconds that have passed since midnight UTC on January 1, 1970. Times before that are represented as negative values.
We can also wire a date or specifier in from a Text Input Module. If we wire in the specifier “yesterday”, the Date Builder Module will return that exact date and time.
The Date Builder Module is great for manipulating dates and times.
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