Transforming Duration String to usuable numbers

Developers Central
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Im building a clockify pack and they return any durations in a strange string format. Heres an example:

  • API Returns duration string as: PT45H15M
  • This should be transformed to: 45 hours and 15 minutes or 45.25 hours

On the Pack side, what is the best/easiest way to transform such a string to an actual duration unit? Some fancy Regex?

Thanks! (@Paul_Danyliuk , @Eric_Koleda , @Nick_HE any help here?)

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I won’t be of much help :sweat_smile: … But it’s an ISO duration (ISO 8601 - Wikipedia) :wink:

P stands for period :blush:… T for time, etc…

In terms of conversions though, I stumbled upon this topic on StackOverflow: iso8601 - Convert ISO 8601 duration with JavaScript - Stack Overflow (:innocent:)

(Sorry @Scott_Collier-Weir I can’t help you here :innocent: )

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This post explain it very well and gives a couple of options: How to parse ISO 8601 duration strings in JavaScript

The best option is to transform to seconds and use coda Duration value hint type to display it.

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And in case you haven’t seen it, here’s the docs on creating durations in Packs: Data types - Coda Pack SDK

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So, what I will need to do is transform my PT. . . string into one of these formats using regex?

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image1684×1328 102 KB

My best guess would be to transform it into seconds and then let coda do the calculation on the backend to transform that into a duration type?

Dear goodness I have no idea how to do that
:raised_hands:
EDIT: Maybe I do

Heres what I went for:

let durationRaw = "PT1H30M15S";
let myRegex = /(-)?P(?:([.,\d]+)Y)?(?:([.,\d]+)M)?(?:([.,\d]+)W)?(?:([.,\d]+)D)?T(?:([.,\d]+)H)?(?:([.,\d]+)M)?(?:([.,\d]+)S)?/
let replaceAll = function (iso8601Duration) {
    var matches = iso8601Duration.match(myRegex);

    return {
        sign: matches[1] === undefined ? '+' : '-',
        years: matches[2] === undefined ? 0 : matches[2],
        months: matches[3] === undefined ? 0 : matches[3],
        weeks: matches[4] === undefined ? 0 : matches[4],
        days: matches[5] === undefined ? 0 : matches[5],
        hours: matches[6] === undefined ? 0 : matches[6],
        minutes: matches[7] === undefined ? 0 : matches[7],
        seconds: matches[8] === undefined ? 0 : matches[8]
    };
};
let myRanFunction = replaceAll(durationRaw)
let days = parseInt(myRanFunction.days, 10)
let hours = parseInt(myRanFunction.hours, 10)
let minutes = parseInt(myRanFunction.minutes, 10)
let seconds = parseInt(myRanFunction.seconds, 10)

let intoSeconds = (days*86400)+(hours*3600)+(minutes*60)+seconds;
console.log(`${intoSeconds} seconds`);

Can anyone help me out to let me know if this is fine? Or do you think I will run into issues? It was a mix of googling, then throwing together other random stuff and running the code over and over until it started working

Its kind of working I think:

image
image1580×1078 281 KB

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My god that regex is terrifying, nice! :rofl:

I think I would just split on ‘T’ which gives you the time designation, then pull out each of the numbers into a variable.

const duration = "PT1H30M15S";
const timeComponent = duration.split("T")[1];
const hours = parseInt(timeComponent.split("H")[0]);
const minutes = parseInt(timeComponent.split("M")[0]);
const seconds = parseInt(timeComponent.split("S")[0]);

const totalSeconds = seconds + 60*minutes + 60*60*hours

I’m surprised that Javascript doesn’t have a built in parser for ISO 8601 Durations. Good SO answers here.

Generally, regex is good to avoid because it is really hard to read.

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So glad you shared this post, Scott. I saw that Youtube just changed their durations to 8601 and I need to update. Also, thanks @Connor_McCormick1 for a simple solution!

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