Odd date comparison calculation

[elingamfelter]

What happened?

I am comparing the number of days between two dates. In the provided DQL snippet, the .days output jumps from 27 to 30 even though I only changed the date by 1 day.

It seems this is because the calculation goes from weeks to month (30 days).

Is there a better way to write this calculation?

DQL

`= date(2024-10-29) - date(2024-10-02)`        // 3 weeks, 6 days
`= (date(2024-10-29) - date(2024-10-02)).days` // 27

`= date(2024-10-30) - date(2024-10-02)`        // 1 month
`= (date(2024-10-30) - date(2024-10-02)).days` // 30

JS

No response

Dataview Version

0.5.67

Obsidian Version

1.7.4

OS

MacOS

[holroy]

I'm not sure why Dataview does this, or if this is an effect coming from the Luxon date library. I reckon it's an attempt to produce humanised duration formats. When I've come across this issue myself, I've either switched to using dataviewjs and using the moment.js library directly, or done the calculations using epoch times (aka seconds since 1970-01-01).

The latter could then look like:

29: `= trunc((number(dateformat(date(2024-10-29), "X")) - number(dateformat(date(2024-10-02), "X"))) / (24 * 60 * 60 ))`   
30: `= trunc((number(dateformat(date(2024-10-30), "X")) - number(dateformat(date(2024-10-02), "X"))) / (24 * 60 * 60 ))`   
31: `= trunc((number(dateformat(date(2024-10-31), "X")) - number(dateformat(date(2024-10-02), "X"))) / (24 * 60 * 60 ))`   

---

Come to think of it, maybe it could be a possible workaround to provide a function like epochday( date ) which produce the number of days since epoch, for usage in calculations like these? Then it could look like: `= epochday(date(2024-10-30)) - epochday(date(2024-10-02)) `, and you'd get the pure day number calculation...