At 03:03p -0500 05/21/2003, Eric Schult didst inscribe upon an electronic papyrus: >on 5/21/03 1:37 PM, Mark Munro wrote: > > > How about using unix to do that? > > > > do shell script "date '+%m.%d.%y'" > >I'm trying to coerce a string ("05212003") into a date (date "Wednesday, May >21, 2003 12:00:00 AM"). Can that be done with a variation of the syntax >above? Not sure, but it's still easy (and fast) in vanilla AppleScript: MMDDYYYY_to_Date("05212003") on MMDDYYYY_to_Date(dstr) local dstr, myDate set myDate to (current date) set year of myDate to text 5 thru 8 of dstr set month of myDate to item (text 1 thru 2 of dstr) of ¬ {January, February, March, April, May, June, ¬ July, August, September, October, November, December} set day of myDate to text 3 thru 4 of dstr set time of myDate to 0 myDate end MMDDYYYY_to_Date