Countdown to event "how many minutes left"

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.

 

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;