Re: quarter code for date

[Jim Meyering]

On Wed, Nov 2, 2016 at 10:36 AM, Pádraig Brady <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 06/10/16 12:53, Pádraig Brady wrote:
>> On 06/10/16 11:11, john woods wrote:
>>> date +%YW%V gives week and year; it would be nice if date +%YQ%q could
>>> return, eg 2016Q3 as having a quarters code in date would save AWKwardness
>>> or shell arithmetic.
>>>
>>> Perhaps we could have
>>> %q 1,2,3,4
>>> %Q 1st quarter; 2nd quarter; 3rd quarter; 4th quarter
>>>
>>> Regards ...
>>
>> This is one of those marginal calls.
>>
>> It's not that awkward to get the quarter number: $(( ($(date +%-m)-1)/3+1 ))
>> But I agree it would be useful to give the number directly.
>>
>> Note you may want to raise your proposal with the glibc team also in their
>> strftime(3) interface; coreutils is hesitant to add new % modifiers in
>> date(1) without prior practice from C libraries.
>>
>> Note ruby uses %Q to give the number of milliseconds since epoch.
>> So we might skip that?
>> BTW 1 -> 1st etc. functionality might be useful to add to numfmt(1).
>>
>> Note perl Date::Format uses %q to give the quarter number, starting with 1
>>
>> I'd be 60:40 for adding it.
>
> Propose patch attached,
> which we can add after the corresponding gnulib patch lands.

Looks fine. Thanks!