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Need Helping Calculating Elapsed Time

junipero
Registered: Oct 13 2010
Posts: 1

I have a basic Acrobat form to track volunteer hours. The user enters a start time and end time for each session. The elapsed time field is auto-calculated for each session as well as the page total. Time formatting is "h:MM tt".
 
Everything works as long as the user enters times in the form "11:00" or "11:00 pm" (default is "am" if no am/pm is entered).
 
What I've been struggling with is how to allow time entry as "11" or "11 am", which throws errors on the auto-calc. I've tried using Custom Calculation, Validation, Formatting but to no avail.
 
I've learned a lot in the hours I've spent reading thru the great date/time tutorials in the forum, but am at an impasse.
 
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

thomp
Expert
Registered: Feb 15 2006
Posts: 4411
One method is to set the formatting so that the user is forced to enter the correct time format.

But you could also put in code to do some checking and fix up in the calculation script. Use a regular expression to identify the missing parts of the input and then add in default values.

For example: /(\d{1,2})\:?(\d{1,2})?\s*(am?|pm?)?/i
This regular expression captures all three parts of the time string. And then you can test to find out what's missing.


Thom Parker
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