{"id":4429,"date":"2020-11-01T00:01:08","date_gmt":"2020-11-01T07:01:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/c-for-dummies.com\/blog\/?p=4429"},"modified":"2020-11-08T08:35:00","modified_gmt":"2020-11-08T16:35:00","slug":"calculating-months","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/c-for-dummies.com\/blog\/?p=4429","title":{"rendered":"Calculating Months"},"content":{"rendered":"

I recently updated my Wambooli website’s front page<\/a> to show only recent blog posts. I don’t regularly maintain the Wamblog any longer, so it was disappointing for me to see “recent posts” from ages ago. Therefore, I did a little coding to ensure that only recent posts appear or nothing.
\n
\nWhat I wanted was to show only blog posts made within the past two months. The problem is to determine which posts are recent based on today’s date. While I wrote the code in PHP, it translates well into C: The core of the code is to get the sequential number for the current month.<\/p>\n

For example, this month (November) is the 24,251st<\/sup> month since year zero:<\/p>\n

2020 * 12 + 11<\/code><\/p>\n

I’m not considering any oddball years when months were skipped or added. This detail isn’t necessary for my calculation.<\/p>\n

After determining the current month number, I was able to use the same function on a blog post’s timestamp. Subtract one from the other, and if the difference is less than two months, it’s a “recent” blog post.<\/p>\n

Your challenge for this month’s Exercise is to reproduce my monthcount()<\/em> function. Given the current date or any date stored in a time_t<\/em> variable, return an integer representing the current month count. Here is a programming skeleton to get you started:<\/p>\n

2020_11_01-Lesson.c<\/a><\/h3>\n
\r\n#include <stdio.h>\r\n#include <time.h>\r\n\r\nint monthcount(time_t date)\r\n{\r\n}\r\n\r\nint main()\r\n{\r\n    int month;\r\n    time_t now;\r\n\r\n    time(&now);                    \/* get the current date\/time *\/<\/span>\r\n    month = monthcount(now);    \/* calculate total number of months *\/<\/span>\r\n    printf(\"This month is number %d\\n\",month);\r\n\r\n    return(0);\r\n}<\/pre>\n
In my sample code, I obtain the count for the current month, though you can supply any time_t<\/em> value as the function’s argument. The integer value returned is the month count. The solution involves manipulating the time_t<\/em> value to extract years and months, doing a little math, then sending back the result.<\/p>\n
Please try this Exercise on your own before you check out my solution<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is month number 24251. Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-exercise"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-for-dummies.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-for-dummies.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-for-dummies.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-for-dummies.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-for-dummies.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4429"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/c-for-dummies.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4429\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4467,"href":"https:\/\/c-for-dummies.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4429\/revisions\/4467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-for-dummies.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-for-dummies.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-for-dummies.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}