Countdown to event "how many minutes left"

[kibbitzer]

G'day All,
I'm trying to display, in a CTC control (written to by a user defined System I/O variable), the AMOUNT of time, expressed in minutes and seconds (and optionally, hours) until sunrise, sunset or a particular time of day. At this satge, I only wish to have a maximum of 60 minutes maximum before the event (hours seem to be a lot more difficult).

global variables:
intTime2event := integer
strTime2event := string

Module:
{*********** start of code **************}
begin
intTime2event := sunset - "01:00:00" - time; {one hour before the event: sunset}
TimeToString(intTime2event, strTime2event);
SetStringSystemIO("Time to Event", strTime2event);
{Delay(60); in case I want to refresh the display once a minute}
end;
{*********** end of code **************}

This results in a 'time of day' displaying. The minutes count down correctly, but the 12H and AM are unwanted.

Is there a way to truncate/extract the string so that only the minutes and seconds portion of the string are written to the variable?

or...

Can I get around this by somehow initialising and starting a timer, set by schedule, at a particular time and displaying the results?... I know that timers only count UP... so I'm in the dark! (not very punny!)

Regards,

Peter.

[Dave Byron]

Peter

Look up the copy command, you can extract bytes with starting position and length parms. i do this to get just hours and min

dave


TimeToString(time, Long_time);

if length(Long_time) = 10 then
Copy(Short_time, Long_time, 1, 4)
else
Copy(Short_time, Long_time, 1, 5);
end;