powerhouse,
Yes, you can do this sort of thing. There are a lot of modules on CPAN for date/time manipulation and my personal favorite is Time::Local. It will allow you to translate a human readable date back into seconds since epoch. It doesn't get much simpler than that unless you want to create a sub to handle calculating the seconds that can be hidden away and be re-used.

Cheers - L~R

Update follows: 

my $saleend = get_time($in{'saleend');
my $salestart = get_time($in{'salestart');

# nasty sub hidden away
sub get_time {
    my $input = shift;
    if ($input eq "always") {
        return time() + (365 * 24 * 60 * 60);
    }
    else {
        return time() + ($input * 24 * 60 * 60);
}

[download]

Cheers - L~R
Update: Modified localtime to time

In reply to Re: add to localtime? by Limbic~Region
in thread add to localtime? by powerhouse

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