Hi

There ae a number of posts on this site on how to validate dates - and they seems to be based on the notion that the date format is known in advance (e.g. checking for valid date).

I have a slightly different situation. I need to validate dates in any number of different files, which can have dates in a number of different formats. I know the posix date format of each date field (e.g. '%d/%m/%Y'), so I have been doing this

my $strp = DateTime::Format::Strptime->new(pattern => $pattern);
...
my $dt = $strp->parse_datetime($value) || <handle error>;

[download]

Of course, creating a DateTime object for each field a validate is quite expensive, and it takes too long to run this even a moderately sized file. Does anyone know of another routine that can validate a date against a posix format? Note I can't use something like Date::Manip to intuit the date, because it can't handle some of my cases(d/m/y v m/d/y), whereas the posix string can be used to explicitly state the format.

Thanks

In reply to Fast way to validate dates by astroboy

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