AppleScript: < and > a set date

As red_ mentioned, you need to convert the text from the page to a date object in order to do any comparisons.

This is a lot trickier than it should be, but here's a revised version of your script that should do the trick.

It uses Apple's NSDataDetectors to extract the date from the string - this should be reliable for various date formats:

use framework "Foundation"

use scripting additions

tell application "Google Chrome"

repeat with x from 0 to ((execute active tab of first window javascript "document.getElementsByTagName('p').length") - 1)

set theEnd to execute active tab of first window javascript "document.getElementsByTagName('p')[" & x & "].outerHTML"

if theEnd contains "issue-date" then exit repeat

end repeat

set theEnd to execute active tab of first window javascript "document.getElementsByTagName('p')[" & x & "].innerHTML"

set e to my strToDate(theEnd)

set issueDate to (date "Thursday, March 1, 2018 at 12:00:00 AM")

if e is greater than or equal to issueDate then set theResult to "Current"

if e is less than issueDate then set theResult to "Ended"

return theResult

end tell

on strToDate(thisString) --

tell current application

set m to its ((NSDataDetector'sdataDetectorWithTypes:(its NSTextCheckingTypeDate) |error|:(missing value))'s matchesInString:thisStringoptions: 0range:{0, length of thisString})

if (count m) > 0 then

set d to (item 1 of m)'s |date|() -- get the NSDate of the first item

return d as date

end if

end tell

return "" -- no match in this string

end strToDate

You are comparing an AppleScript date to a string, so the ended part of your script isn't doing what you think it is, either. Since the date you are extracting from the web page only consists of a month and a year, you will need to add a day part and convert that to an AppleScript Date in order to compare it to your other date, or you can just compare the month numbers and year numbers.

The script works as expected as far as I can tell.

I don't really know the pages you're pulling content from - I just pulled the first URL you posted: https://comicvine.gamespot.com/howard-the-human/4050-83960/

This appears to have a theEnd date of October 31st 2015.

Comparing this to the issueDate of 'Thursday, March 1, 2018 at 12:00:00 AM' date results in 'Ended'.

If I change the comparison issueDate date to some time in 2013 I get 'Current'.

Based on my understanding, that seems to make sense to me. Maybe there's some other logic that's at fault here?

I don't have Google Chrome to test, but it looks like the tested date has a day number, while the others only have the month and year. The Cocoa method used doesn't return a date from something that incomplete, so one solution would be to add a day if there isn't one. Try adding the following to the beginning of the strToDate handler:

if (offset of "," in thisString) = 0 then -- no day, so add one
  set here to (offset of space in thisString)
  tell thisString to set thisString to text 1 thru here & "1," & text here thru -1
end if