mike:1 coldfusion: 0

2005-12-20T01:58:49Z

Cole mentioned that he was trying to parse Unix time stamps from Yahoo’s traffic web services to something human-readable. In ColdFusion. In case you don’t know, CF runs on top of Java and has access to its entire API. “Easy”, thought I, Java’s Date object can deal with milliseconds since epoch, very similar to your Unix time stamps in most regards. ColdFusion’s DateFormat function can then be used to translate Date objects into a human-readable string.

<cfset time = 1135038970>
<cfset date = createObject("java", "java.util.Date").init(time * 1000)>

Nope. The constructor takes a long argument and coldfusion’s scalars cast to doubles when sent to java. So we turn to ColdFusion’s answer, JavaCast.

<cfset date = createObject("java", "java.util.Date").init(JavaCast("long", time * 1000))>

This is where it got weird. Coldfusion threw an error that the number was too big to be cast to an int. What?! Why is it casting anything to an int?!
I tried a slight variation:

<cfset date = createObject("java", "java.util.Date").init(JavaCast("long", time) * 1000)>

It cast time to a long alright, but then multiplying it by 1000 casts it back to a double. So I wracked my brain for a way to get this number multiplied by 1000 into a long. Laughing maniacally, I typed it out:

<cfset date = createObject("java", "java.util.Date").init(createObject("java", "java.lang.Long").parseLong(time & "000"))>

You proved a worthy adversary, ColdFusion, but your crane style was no match for my tiger style.
Oh, and there you go, Cole. :D

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mike:1 coldfusion: 0