Re: Re: Re: Re: Multiple date ranges

The timestamps were entered as free text in a web form. No checking of any kind - pick a format, any format. I have a roughly 200 line perl regexp script that has got (nearly)all of them into ISO format (YYYY-MM-DD).

Spotting who is currently a member is easy (apart from anything else, that info exists in another database I didn't tell you about). What I was looking for was a more elegant way of handling the other queries, e.g. using Date::Range, than a brute force approach...

Comment on Re: Re: Re: Re: Multiple date ranges

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Re: Multiple date ranges by Hofmator (Curate) on Feb 03, 2003 at 13:44 UTC
The timestamps were entered as free text in a web form.No checking of any kind - pick a format, any format. I have a roughly 200 line perl regexp script that has got (nearly)all of them into ISO format (YYYY-MM-DD). Did you give Date::Manip a try?? It's a big and slow module but quite good at parsing dates in any format, take a look at the ParseDate function. This could save you from having to program monsters like 200 line regex scripts ... -- Hofmator	[reply]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Multiple date ranges by Anonymous Monk on Feb 03, 2003 at 13:34 UTC
You know what, use DBD-SQLite. Date::Range is not for you (unless you got tons of memory, and wanna have 4500 Date::Range objects --- stupid) Build a new database out of your flat file, and SQL to query it any which way you want.	[reply]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Multiple date ranges by Anonymous Monk on Feb 03, 2003 at 13:37 UTC
The timestamps were entered as free text in a web form. I hope that's the #1 thing on your to-do list (give the users a pulldown menu, or simply use localtime/gmtime) You wanna handle SQL-esque type queries in a non-SQL way, you're gonna have to bend over backwards to do it. You need to involve another database and create kinds of indexes.	[reply]