And I know that requirements often come from outside your control, but I would advise against the MMDDYY format and stick with ISO-standard YYYY-MM-DD format. Why erase the century digits? Why use a format that will take a lot of effort to sort properly? Is 0801 supposed to be August 1 or 8 January? The ISO format takes a few more characters but gives back more in terms of readability, stability and functionality.

--
[ e d @ h a l l e y . c c ]

The reason im switching to mmddyy from yyyy-mm-dd format is due to the proprietary database system i use at work, it is quite old and set in its ways, much like everything else here. I can assure you I'd love to change things up, but in my odd position, I'm given all the responsiblity in the world, and zero power or authority. I gotta basically limbo here at work, under BS deadlines, etc. and not being able to change things.

Nobody has mentioned Time::Piece which has a nice interface to strptime and strftime:

use Time::Piece;

print localtime
   ->strptime('2003-08-01','%Y-%m-%d')
   ->strftime('%m%d%y')
;
[download]

jeffa

L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
H---H---H---H---H---H---
(the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)

Is the date always going to be YYYY-MM-DD? If so, you could just use substr to convert it yourself

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

my $oldDate = '2003-08-01';
my $YY = substr($oldDate, 2, 2);
my $MM = substr($oldDate, 5, 2);
my $DD = substr($oldDate, 8, 2);
my $newDate = $MM . $DD . $YY;
[download]

There's very little that Date::Manip can do that other modules can't do better and faster.

In your case, the problem is so simple that an external module isn't needed.

$date = '2003-08-01';
$newdate = join('', ($date =~ /(\d\d)/g)[2, 3, 1]);
[download]

But as others have pointed out, please do all you can to resist moving from the logical and useful YYYY-MM-DD format to the illogical and useless MMDDYY.

"The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about Perl club."
-- Chip Salzenberg

s/^\d\d(\d\d)-(\d\d)-(\d\d)$/$2$3$1/ or die "Improperly formatted date
+ $_\n";
[download]

my($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year) = localtime;
my $current_time = sprintf("%02d%02d%02d%02d%02d%02d", $year-100,$mon+
+1,$mday,$hour,$min,$sec);
[download]

I'm ultimately going with your idea there, after coming back to this problem. Thanks!