Live updating counter (need to use strings or array?)

Processing Coding Questions
11

uhh i don’t understand how to change the timestamp and where to add how long im willing to wait for the code to work…? ^^’ or what you mean by splitting the timestamp in its components…
(im so sorry i feel like im taking so much of your time)

imagining we have dates going from 15/12/2020 12:34 to 24/12/2020 13:23, would it be more like

dt = int(timestamp.substring(15, 24));
      mt = int(timestamp.substring(12, 12));
      yt = int(timestamp.substring(2020, 2020));
      ht = int(timestamp.substring(12, 13));
      mnt_t = int(timestamp.substring(34, 23));

or more like

dt = int(timestamp.substring(1, 5));
      mt = int(timestamp.substring(1, 2));
      yt = int(timestamp.substring(0, 2));
      ht = int(timestamp.substring(1, 3));
      mnt_t = int(timestamp.substring(2, 4));

since it uses only the numbers used to check the time between each “event”? Or nothing like that at all?? I was confused because the 15,17 for mnt_t returned “StringIndexOutOfBoundsException: String index out of range: 17”

by the way, Merry christmas if you celebrate that, and happy holidays if you don’t!