Hi, so when you got the error, did you print out the value of $date to see what you were passing to the parser?

The first answer you got had all the tools you needed. Here I've added Test::More so I can set up some simple testing of my subroutine, checking comparisons that I already know the answer to. It's a good way to develop your code. 

use strict;
use warnings;
use feature 'state';
use Test::More;
use DateTime::Format::Strptime;

for my $line (<DATA>) {
    chomp $line;
    my ( $first, $second, $expected ) = split /,/, $line;

    is( date_cmp($first, $second), $expected, "compared to $first, $se
+cond is $expected" );
}

done_testing;

exit;

sub date_cmp {
    state $parser = DateTime::Format::Strptime->new(pattern => '%m/%d/
+%Y');

    my $dt1 = $parser->parse_datetime(shift) or die $parser->errmsg;
    my $dt2 = $parser->parse_datetime(shift) or return 'invalid';

    return 'equal' if $dt1 eq $dt2;

    return $dt1 > $dt2 ? 'earlier' : 'later';
}

__DATA__
03/02/1999,03/01/1999,earlier
03/02/1999,03/03/1999,later
03/02/1999,03/02/1998,earlier
03/02/1999,03/02/2000,later
03/02/1999,03/02/1999,equal
03/02/1999,03/02/199 ,invalid

[download]
Output: 
$ perl dt.pl
ok 1 - compared to 03/02/1999, 03/01/1999 is earlier
ok 2 - compared to 03/02/1999, 03/03/1999 is later
ok 3 - compared to 03/02/1999, 03/02/1998 is earlier
ok 4 - compared to 03/02/1999, 03/02/2000 is later
ok 5 - compared to 03/02/1999, 03/02/1999 is equal
ok 6 - compared to 03/02/1999, 03/02/199  is invalid
1..6

[download]

Hope this helps!


The way forward always starts with a minimal test.

In reply to Re^3: How to compare two dates? by 1nickt
in thread How to compare two dates? by CountOne

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