[htdig] Sorting by time

[David Melton]

I've just realized that I have a problem sorting search results, and it seems like it would be a common problem.  I've taken a look at the docs and FAQs, but I didn't see any solution.   I have two ht://Dig databases for two large sets of html files.  One is a mailing list archive (generated with MHonArc) that contanins 33,000+ message files.  The other is a collection of historical data in 670 separate html files.    In both cases, searching by time is meaningless, since the timestamp of the files has nothing to do with the date of the original message to the mailing list, or to the date of the historical data.    Is there any way to change the way that ht://Dig determines the date for a file that it's searching?  In the case of the list archive, it would be simple to write an external script to get the date from the message's X-Date: header.  I would expect that this might be widely useful.  In the case of my other application, I could also write a simple program to extract a date from the html file.   If there is a way to make ht://Dig find the file date in a different way, that would be great.  If not, I may have to write a utility to get the message time and utime() the file's timestamp appropriately.  My other case could be more of a problem, since the historical files contain data going back to 1757, which is a long time before 1970...   Any suggestions are welcome!   Thanks,   Dave Melton