Hi, this: "if TODAY is before May 1 every year" is not clear to me.

• What does "every year" mean?
  
  
• Do you want to compare known dates, or do you want to know the answer at any given moment in time? In other words, will it matter what time it is when you make the calculation, and/or what the time zones are (as shown by ikegami)?

Thinking about those aspects of your question should help lead to you to right solution.

• In some cases it is absolutely necessary to instantiate full-blown DateTime objects with floating TZ.
  
  
• In other cases you don't have to worry about TZ (eg if you are comparing dates from two sources you control and you use UTC throughout your system (as you should in most cases)).
  
  
• In still other cases it's enough to compare strings (e.g. if you are comparing two dates that are known to be in the same TZ and are expressed in ISO format):

  my $d2 = "2019-12-29T12:34:56";
  my $d1 = "2019-05-01T00:00:00";
  
  say ($d2 lt $d1 ? "before" : "on or after");
  [download]

  (You can easily get today's date in ISO format with the core module Time::Piece: $now = Time::Piece->new->datetime;)

Hope this helps!

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