Creating a string for a date stamp

dthacker has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I've have a program that copies files from a log directory to an archive directory and appends a date stamp to the end of the filename. After looking at some other code locally I used this sub to create the datestamp:

sub get_time_stamp() {
   my @tan=Today_and_Now();
   my $stamp=join '', @tan[0..4];
   return $stamp;
 }
[download]

Unfortunately this is giving me YYYYMDDHHMM instead of YYYYMMDDHHMM. Is there a more effective way of getting the string I want than padding the output of Today_and_Now?

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Re: Creating a string for a date stamp by danboo (Beadle) on Sep 20, 2001 at 00:39 UTC
i'd recommend sprintf here: `sub get_time_stamp() { my @tan=Today_and_Now(); my $stamp= sprintf '%d%02d%02d%02d%02d', @tan[0..4]; return $stamp; }` [download] or the brief version: `sub get_time_stamp() { sprintf '%d%02d%02d%02d%02d', (Today_and_Now())[0..4]; }` [download] this will keep all all the potential 1 or 2 digit fields padded with a zero. cheers, - danboo	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Creating a date stamp (Russ: POSIX::strftime) by Russ (Deacon) on Sep 20, 2001 at 01:19 UTC
Look at POSIX::strftime. You provide a format string (similar to sprintf) which would look very similar to the format strings you gave as examples :-) Russ Brainbench 'Most Valuable Professional' for Perl	[reply]
Re: Creating a string for a date stamp by mitd (Curate) on Sep 20, 2001 at 05:08 UTC
good old mitd's fav' Date::Format. It is your friend. mitd-Made in the Dark 'My favourite colour appears to be grey.'	[reply]