Google Earth KML Date Formatting

I am just building stuff using Google Earth, especially the new time stamped stuff. Very nice, really.

However GE expects dates in the format 2006-11-17 which isn't so bad in itself. It's AppleScript's fault that it is a pain to format dates other than the system's preset. You just do a

set dateString to (year of theDate) & "-" & (month of theDate as number) & "-" & (day of theDate)

and there you go. Nevertheless GE still choked on my formatted dates: 2006-9-5 can't be parsed by Google Earth. The leading 0 is mandatory!? WTF!?

Well here is the solution:

on format_date(theDate)
 tell theDate
  set y to year as string
  set m to (month of theDate as number) as string
  if (count of m) is 1 then set m to "0" & m
  set d to day as string
  if (count of d) is 1 then set d to "0" & d
 end tell
 return y & "-" & m & "-" & d
end format_date