epoch1 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi monks, We've been using the following code on a legacy system for years but users have reported recently that something isn't working correctly: 
$expected_date = '2016-11-05 14:00';
$actual_date = '2016-11-09 14:00';

my $delta = DateCalc($expected_date,$actual_date);
#print $delta = 0:0:0:0:96:0:0

$delta = Delta_Format($delta,0,"%dh");
#print $delta = 0

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I believe the final $delta value should be 4 (days) but it is 0. Does anyone know why this is happening and how I can rectify this? Thanks monks.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Date Manip Delta_Format
by SBECK (Chaplain) on Nov 09, 2016 at 14:40 UTC
    From the Date::Manip documentation: 
       %Xh  : print the value of field X and all
          larger units in terms of X
    so you are asking for the values of the fields of d (day) and higher in terms of days.

    The values of all fields higher are 0:0:0:0, which is a total of 0 days, so what you got is expected.

    It appears to me that what you are really asking for is the value of the delta in days, but ignoring the fact that a day is not strictly 24 hours (due to daylight saving time).

    The following will do that: 

       Delta_Format($delta,'semi',0,'%dt')
      => 4

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[d/l]
      By the way, the format of the delta did change (from an older 0:0:0:4:0:0:0 to a newer 0:0:0:0:96:0:0) to handle the fact that a day was not a constant length period of time. That change was quite a while ago though, so I wonder if you upgraded Date::Manip recently after a long period of using an older version. That would explain why this just started failing for you.
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        Thank you. It was due to the module update.
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