Fetching Only Month and Year From localtime()

amt has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: localtime by gellyfish (Monsignor) on Jan 05, 2005 at 16:55 UTC
I think you'll probably want something like: `my ($month, $year) = (localtime())[4,5];` [download] You may want to fix the offsets afterwards of course. /J\	[reply] [d/l]
Re: localtime by ikegami (Patriarch) on Jan 05, 2005 at 16:56 UTC
`$year = (localtime())[5] + 1900;` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re: localtime by ambrus (Abbot) on Jan 05, 2005 at 20:28 UTC
Either `$year = 1900 + (localtime)[5]; $mon = 1 + (localtime)[4];` [download] or `(undef, undef, undef, undef, $mon, $year) = localtime; $mon += 1;` [download] or, combining the two `($mon, $year) = (localtime)[4,5]; $mon += 1; $year += 1900; warn $year +, " ", $mon;` [download] In all these cases, the parentheses do the magic: in the first case, `(LIST)[INDICES]` the parenthesis is part of the syntax of the indexing operator. In the second case, the parentheses make the assignment a list assignment. It's because all this magic (and the magic of the x operator), that some people think parenthesis are the operator for creating lists in perl. Just one more thing about parens: `qw/jan feb mar apr may jun jul aug sep oct nov dec/[(localtime)[4]]` returns the abbrev of the current month (don't use this, as it does not take locales into account), and it does indexing without parenthesis or a silgil ($ or @), so it contradicts to what I've said.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: localtime by jZed (Prior) on Jan 05, 2005 at 16:56 UTC
Either "print scalar localtime" for a pre-formatted string, or else grab the elements of the localtime array and format the string yourself (not forgetting about things like 0-based months).	[reply]
Re: localtime by ysth (Canon) on Jan 05, 2005 at 20:11 UTC
The `(LIST)[LIST]` syntax others have shown is called a list slice. It allows you to have an arbitrary expression that generates a list in the `()` and extract arbitrary elements from it, by specifying the index/indicies in the `[]`.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
•Re^2: localtime by merlyn (Sage) on Jan 05, 2005 at 20:21 UTC
Yup. List slice. One of the few bits of Perl that I can genuinely claim ownership of. One of the others is coderef arrow (`$coderef->(@args)`). -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Fetching Only Month and Year From localtime() by Juerd (Abbot) on Jan 05, 2005 at 23:01 UTC
I'm looking to grab the current month and current year to default in a form, but I don't want to create an array. Can I access the localtime elements directly with localtime[0] or is there another method. In addition to the list slices and list assignments with undef on the LHS, you can also opt to use POSIX::strftime. This also takes the way the need to add 1 to the month and 1900 to the year. As I don't see the point in having separate variables for this, I guess you're building an ISO date in "2005-01" format. `use POSIX qw(strftime); my $month = strftime "%Y-%m", localtime;` [download] Juerd # { site => 'juerd.nl', plp_site => 'plp.juerd.nl', do_not_use => 'spamtrap' }	[reply] [d/l]