Making System.out.println() return a String

At some point, recently, I needed to do both of these things in one little Java expression:
- output a String to stdout
- return the same String

System.out.println() returns 'void', and you can't cast void to String, so I struggled with this for a little while. Here's what I came up with (download here if it looks ugly in the blog):

public class VoidToString
{
  public static void main(String[] args)
  {
    System.out.println("returned value: [" +
      new Object()
      {
        public String q(String p)
        {
          System.out.println("stdout: [" + p + "]");
          return p;
        }
      }.q("blah") + "]");
  }
}


It ended up not working in the context I was trying to use it in, because the 3rd-party API I was using did not appreciate the inner class, but I still thought it was a neat little trick.

getting the current date in a particular format in Windows XP/2003

I needed to get the current date, in the format 'yyyy-MM-dd', and use that value multiple times within a batch file.

The command 'DATE /T' returns a date like this:
Tue 06/20/2006

But I needed:
2006-06-20

Now, this would have been extraordinarily easy, if I could use 4nt, cygwin, nclip, or any number of other tools. However, my options were limited on the machine that I needed to run this on, as it is a production web application server. So, I had to come up with a way to do this using the tools I had available to me:
- Windows 2003 Server (assumed to be a default installation, or more minimal than that)
- Sybase ASE 12.5.x
- Java

I probably could have just written a simple java application to do this, but where's the fun in THAT? :)

So, I consulted with my good friend, Jeff Scanlon, as I usually do when I have an interesting tech challenge, and together we came up with this batch file [NOTE: you can download it here, if the code gets too munged with the blogger html/css]:

------ BEGIN BATCH FILE -------

@echo off
REM generate SQL script to get date in correct format:
echo select 'set my_date=' + str_replace(convert(char(20),getdate(),102),'.','-') >%TEMP%\getDate_yyyy-MM-dd.sql
echo go >>%TEMP%\getDate_yyyy-MM-dd.sql

REM run the SQL script to generate a simple, temporary batch file:
isql -U username -P password -i %TEMP%\getDate_yyyy-MM-dd.sql | findstr set >%TEMP%\set_my_date.bat

REM run the temporary batch file, which will set an environment variable, 'MY_DATE', to contain the date:
call %TEMP%\set_my_date.bat

REM clean up
del /q %TEMP%\set_my_date.bat
del /q %TEMP%\getDate_yyyy-MM-dd.sql

REM this is where you'd actually put code that uses the date, like:
REM md c:\backup\%MY_DATE%
REM copy c:\mystuff\*.* c:\backup\%MY_DATE%

------ END BATCH FILE -------