Question

I need some help here. I stuck in my programming in manipulation of my date.
Date is in format of DD-MON-YY and I want to check it if the user input the correct date format. So I create a function to test the date, the month and the year separately, but the function also read the “-” in the format so I decided to use this code:

echo -n " Date [ DD-MON-YY ]:"  #user will input the date
        read dates
        vardate=$ echo "$dates" | tr "-" " "
        echo $vardate

I use that so there will be no problem with “-” character when I call the function.
but the problem now is how can I save the 3 parts of the date [day, month, year]?? so my function can evaluate it properly.

My function:

datefxn(){

d1 = $date1
d2 = $month1
d3 = $year1

########## check the DAY #####################

test ${#d1} -eq 2 || s=" INVALID!"

if [ "$d1" -gt 0 ] && [ "$d1" -le 31 ]
then
    break ;;
else
    echo "Month is OUT OF RANGE!"
fi

########## check the DAY #####################  

test ${#d2} -eq 3 || s=" INVALID!"

MONTH=(Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec)
echo "${MONTH[@]}"

for element in "${MONTH[@]}"
do
if [[ $element == $d2 ]]
then
       echo " a "
      break
        else
        echo " WAAA "
    fi
    done
########## check the YEAR ##################### 

test ${#d3} -eq 2 || s=" INVALID!"


} #end datefxn()

Answer 1

Something like this:

#!/bin/bash
datefxn () {
        d1=$1
        d2=$2
        d3=$3
        echo "Date is $d1"
        echo "Month is $d2"
}

inp='24-12-2004';
vardate=$(echo "$inp" | tr "-" " ")
datefxn $vardate

The above solution is given to fix your code.

Update:
A better approach would be like this one using arrays and in-place substitution:

#!/bin/bash

datefxn () {
        dt=($(echo ${1//-/ }))
        echo "Date  is  ${dt[0]}"
        echo "Month is  ${dt[1]}"
        echo "Year  is  ${dt[2]}"
}

inp='24-12-2004';
datefxn "$inp"