I'm writing a reporting tool that draws information out of a database. Each time the report is run, I will only need the new items that were added the half-month before the current.....let me explain. Say today is january 25, so I'd like to see all of the items in my DB added from Jan 1 thru Jan 15. If Today were Jan 9 I would want to report on the entries added from Dec 16 thru the last day of December. So if I'm in the last half of the month, I'd like to report on the first half, if I'm in the first half of the month, I'd like to report on the last half of last month.

I need these dates in YYYYMMDD format. ( TIMESTAMP(8) )

Here is what I have written so far, I tried to do it using Date::Time, but I'm not familliar with the module. I'm afraid that this code may have errors since I didn't use a CPAN module specific to the task. Do any of you monks see a better way of doing this, or do you see any shortcomings of this code? 

sub newrelease {
print " New Releases \n";

my $start_day;
my $end_day;

(my $day,my $month,my $year) = (localtime)[3,4,5];
 
if ($day > 15) {  
    $start_day = sprintf("%04d%02d%02d", $year + 1900, $month + 1, 0);
    $end_day   = sprintf("%04d%02d%02d", $year + 1900, $month + 1, 15)
+;
    }
if ($day <= 15) { 
    $start_day = sprintf("%04d%02d%02d", $year + 1900, $month, 15);
    $end_day   = sprintf("%04d%02d%02d", $year + 1900, $month , 31);
    }

    print "New Releases from $start_day to $end_day \n";

# pass datestamp off to my &sql sub outside of this block of code
&sql("stamp > $start_day and stamp =< $end_day"); 
}

[download]
Thanks,

-Silent11

In reply to date span in YYYYMMDD by silent11

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