[Zope] string splitting in dtml

[Spicklemire, Jerry]

Mike said:

> I tried what you recommended and got the following error:
>
> Error Type: AttributeError
> Error Value: __getslice__
>
> The problem I think is that the variable is drawn from the database as
type
> date (Microsoft Access 2k) and somehow is cast into a date type.  Is there
a
> way to re-cast this variable as a string type?

You're right, it's not really a string, even though Zope is smart enough 
to render it into one when inserting it directly into HTML.

> I also tried the
> 
> <dtml-var "_.string.split(start_date, '/')[1]">
> 
> solution but got the error:
> 
> Error Type: TypeError
> Error Value: argument 1: expected read-only character buffer, instance
found

Now if only Zope were smart enough to tel us what it "really" is, 
so we could transform it! 

It looks like MS Access delivers dates as some proprietary object type.

However, in your query, you may be able to wrap the date field like so:

	to_char(dateFieldName)

to convince MS Access to return a formatted string instead. 
Once you can see what the string looks like, the slicing bit 
should work.

Good Luck!
Jerry S.