formatting dates

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

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Re: formatting dates by Abigail-II (Bishop) on Oct 06, 2003 at 11:46 UTC
`$date = "YYYYMMDD"; $date =~ s/(.{4})(.{2})(.{2})/$1-$2-$3/; # Yeah, you can save a f +ew chars. But I find this clearer.` [download] Abigail	[reply] [d/l]
Re: formatting dates by antirice (Priest) on Oct 06, 2003 at 13:00 UTC
In the spirit of TIMTOWTDI: `$date = "20031006"; $date = join "-",unpack("a4a2a2",$date);` [download] Of course, I'd probably say doing it with the regex would be preferred. antirice The first rule of Perl club is - use Perl The ith rule of Perl club is - follow rule i - 1 for i > 1	[reply] [d/l]
Re: formatting dates by Albannach (Monsignor) on Oct 06, 2003 at 13:19 UTC
I would use the regex by reflex, I think the unpack is pretty cool, and for yet more TIMTOWTDI, this is just ammo for those that like to benchmark substr against regexen: `$date = 'yyyymmdd'; substr($date,$_,0) = '-' for(6,4);` [download] Update: stupid typo fixed -- I'd like to be able to assign to an luser	[reply] [d/l]
Re: formatting dates by jeffa (Bishop) on Oct 06, 2003 at 13:06 UTC
More TIMTOWTDI: Time::Piece `use Time::Piece; print localtime->strptime(20030713,'%Y%m%d')->strftime('%Y-%m-%d');` [download] jeffa L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L-- -R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B-- H---H---H---H---H---H--- (the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)	[reply] [d/l]
Re: formatting dates by Roger (Parson) on Oct 06, 2003 at 12:06 UTC
I was doing almost the samething earlier today at work, where I formatted date to yyyy/mm/dd instead. The following code should format the date to your specification. `$date =~ s/(\d{4})(\d{2})(\d{2})/$1-$2-$3/;` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re: formatting dates (idempotent) by tye (Sage) on Oct 06, 2003 at 18:50 UTC
Here is a way that works on dates with or without punctuation (: `$date = sprintf "%d%d-%02d-%02d", $date =~ /(\d\d?)/g` [download] - tye	[reply] [d/l]
Re: formatting dates by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Oct 06, 2003 at 19:35 UTC
For the sake of completeness, an ultra flexible solution: `use Time::Local; use POSIX qw(strftime); my ($Y, $M, $D) = unpack "A4 A2 A2", $date; $M--; my $newdate = strftime('%Y-%m-%d', gmtime timegm(0, 0, 0, $D, $M, $Y)) +;` [download] Of course for just changing the naming scheme on a few files or something like that, it does a ridiculous amount of work and I'd stick with a join. Makeshifts last the longest.	[reply] [d/l]