NEW SERVER - 11.9.2020 ... Retiring, March 2020 - sorry, you have missed our final public course. The Coronavirus situation has lead us to suspend public training - which was on the cards anyway, with no plans to resume
Please ask about private 'maintenance' training for Python, Tcl, Perl, PHP, Lua, etc
Happily continuing private consultancy / programming work |
Time conversions in Perl
Time isn't the easiest unit on which to do arithmetic, and dates expressed as a human-readable string are quite tricky to sort. Just imagine trying to write a program to work out whether 9 p.m. Pacific time on 28th Feb was before or after 3 a.m. in the UK on 1st March. And did you realise that, sorted alphabetically, the week starts on Friday and ends on Wednesday in England ... and it starts on Sunday and ends on Friday in France.
In Perl, all is neatly and elegantly solved for you ... you simply work in seconds from 1st January 1970, and use
localtime to convert from seconds into hour, minute, second, day, month, year
timelocal to convert the other way (from 6 values into a single number of seconds)
In order to use localtime, you need to use the Time::Local module which is supplied as standard with Perl anyway, although localtime is always available without pulling any extra module in.
gmtime and timegm provide Greenwich Mean Time convertors rather than convertors for your local time zone, and localtime and gmtime in a scalar context will give you a string rather than a list of numbers - so that makes output formatting very easy.
A final piece in the puzzle ... if you stat a file, the list you get back includes the times that the file was accessed, modified and changed each in seconds from 1.1.1970 - giving use an easy way to compare file stamps, or file ages versus some other timed happening.
Like to see an example?
use Time::Local;
# get the current time (seconds from 1.1.1970)
$now = time();
# in LIST context, localtime returns a list of each part of the time
# second, minute, hour, day, month, year, weekday, yearday, dst
# in SCALAR context, localtime returns string
@lpart = localtime($now);
$spart = localtime($now);
print "$spart ... @lpart ...\n";
# Work out the timestamp for a year ago ...
$lpart[5]--;
$past = timelocal(@lpart);
# and see if a file is over a year old ...
($finfo) = (stat("/etc/hosts"))[9];
($finfo < $past) ?
print "File is over a year old\n":
print "File is recent\n";
(written 2005-10-02, updated 2006-06-05)
Associated topics are indexed as below, or enter http://melksh.am/nnnn for individual articles P216 - Perl - Handling Dates and Time [765] Perl - turning seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds - (2006-06-17) [239] What and why for the epoch - (2005-03-08)
Some other Articles
Final courses of '05 coming up ....Do the work and take the risk - a PHP contract to avoidLaying out a vegetarian lunchA Stengthening dayTime conversions in PerlCommenting Perl regular expressionsIs enough enough?Accessing a page via POST from within a PHP scriptWheelchair access - can do!Matching in MySQL
|
4759 posts, page by page
Link to page ... 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96 at 50 posts per page
This is a page archived from The Horse's Mouth at
http://www.wellho.net/horse/ -
the diary and writings of Graham Ellis.
Every attempt was made to provide current information at the time the
page was written, but things do move forward in our business - new software
releases, price changes, new techniques. Please check back via
our main site for current courses,
prices, versions, etc - any mention of a price in "The Horse's Mouth"
cannot be taken as an offer to supply at that price.
Link to Ezine home page (for reading).
Link to Blogging home page (to add comments).
|
|