The question about time and date handling reminded me of a problem I have been putting off for too long.

I have a membership database (about 4500 records) - actually it's a pipe delimited Unicode file, but don't worry about that. The records contain start and end dates (just year month day, no times) of when people were members. A complication is that many of the people have joined and left several times, i.e. they have several start and end dates. Current members have just a start date and no end date (although they may have both start and end dates for previous periods of membership).

My problem is that I need to be able to ask questions like show me everyone who was a member on date X in the past or show me everyone who is now a member or who has been a member in the past ten years.

Date::Range sort of looks like it might help. Is that the right approach (especially when there will be 4500 x 2 or 3 date ranges to be considered)?

Thanks
Andy

In reply to Multiple date ranges by AndyH

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.