working with seconds-since-the-epoch-unix-style may be the fastest and most straight-forward way. As a bonus, future and past are distinguished by the sign of the result of the subtraction of the two dates' epochs.

But you will soon discover that you want to compare dates in different time-zones too. And therefore a module for high-level date construction/parsing/manipulation like DateTime (and its sub-tree) might be more useful to you to use from the start.

If you are only interested in Date rather than Date+Time then Date::Simple has <=> overloaded, which means something like this: if( $dt1 > $dt2 ){ } works fine.

I have used both modules with great satisfaction.

In reply to Re: choosing closest date to a given date by bliako
in thread choosing closest date to a given date by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.