Help for IDGEN

PURPOSE:
idgen queries the system for the current date/time, replaces forbidden
characters with underscores, and appends to prefix. Result is copied
to a TAE TCL variable. Allowed characters are letters, digits, hyphens,
periods and underscores.

LIMITATIONS:
Note that the date/time stamp is at the resolution of seconds, so only
one unique value will be generated per second, for a given prefix.

EXECUTION:

Examples

idgen mystringvar

   generates a string looking like "bob_date_time", where date_time
   is replaced with a current date/time stamp, with forbidden characters
   replaced by underscores, and stores the string in mystringvar, which
   should already have been declared as a string.

idgen prefix="foo_" outvar=mystringvar 'shorter

   generates a string looking like "foo_datetime", where datetime
   is replaced with a current date/time stamp, with non alpha numeric
   characters removed, and the first three characters (the day of week)
   removed for brevity.

idgen prefix="foo_" outvar=mystringvar 'lower

   generates a string looking like "foo_date_time", where date_time
   is replaced with a current date/time stamp, like the first example
   above, but with alphabetic characters forced to lower case.

  

 ORIGINAL PROGRAMMER:    W. Bunch Mon Feb  2 2004
 COGNIZANT PROGRAMMER:   W. Bunch Mon Feb  2 2004
 
 REVISION HISTORY
	Mon Jul 11 2005 W. Bunch Added shorter and lower keywords.  
   Thu Jan  3 2008 wlb switched to USES_ANSI_C AND LIB_CARTO; misc cleanup  
   2022-07-27 B. Crocco afids to opensource
   

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