in reply to Local Date Format

Use POSIX::strftime for that purpose. If you want to find out the template to treat it itself as data, the best I can think of is to look at LC_TIME and do with it what strftime did.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: Local Date Format
by SmokeyB (Scribe) on Feb 22, 2005 at 16:17 UTC
    Thanks for the help. I'm still a little confused on how I can dertermine the date format according to the OS settings. (is it mm/dd/yyyy or yyyy/mm/dd, etc.)
[reply]

      The POSIX::strftime routine has several format specifiers (%B, %c, et al) which will behave correctly for whatever the current locale is. You don't need to worry about the components, just use one of these (%x for your particular question) and let it worry about it. See your platform's man strftime for more details on the specifiers.

[reply]
[d/l]

      This really depends on the OS - on this here system I would probably start by grovelling around in the output from locale LC_TIME however this is not going to be portable and as you don't say what OS you are on you are unlikely to get a more useful response.

      /J\

[reply]
[d/l]
      How portable do you need this to be? On unix, this oughta work, but is dirty:

      my $date_fmt = grep s/^date_fmt="(.*)"$/$1/, `locale -k LC_TIME`;

      You could do this in c (one hopes) on any POSIX system — possibly inlining it in Perl with Inline::C — with the setlocale() function; make the second paramater NULL to query the current locale.

[reply]
[d/l]
[select]
        Thanks gaal, this is a good start and I'll definately be exploring it!
[reply]
Re^2: Local Date Format
by boat73 (Scribe) on Feb 22, 2005 at 17:04 UTC
    Hope this helps, just pass the subroutine a 1 to have it return month/day/year ex: 02/22/2005 or pass it nothing to return $Year$RealMonth${Day}_$Hour${Minute} ex:20050222_122. You can of course play around with the output to return diff formats 
    sub getdate{
    my $ret = "$_[0]";

# Get the all the values for current time
    my ($Second, $Minute, $Hour, $Day, $Month, $Year, $WeekDay, $DayOf
+Year, $IsDST) = localtime(time);

# In Perl, you'll need to increment the month by 1
    my $RealMonth = $Month + 1; # Months of the year are not zero-base
+d

# Perl code will need to be adjusted for one-digit months
    if($RealMonth < 10)
    {
       $RealMonth = "0" . $RealMonth; # add a leading zero to one-digi
+t months
    }

# How to add a leading zero in Perl
    if($Day < 10)
    {
       $Day = "0" . $Day; # add a leading zero to one-digit days
    }

# How to use modulo arithmetic in Perl
    if($Year >= 100) {


       $Fixed_Year = ($Year % 100);
    }
    else
    {
       $Fixed_Year = $Year;
    }

   # 1900 is subtracted from the value returned from localtime
# Add it back in to get a 4-digit year
    $Year += 1900;

# Format the string the way we want
    if ($ret == "1"){
        $today = "$RealMonth\/$Day\/$Year";   
        return $today;
    }
    else{
        $today = "$Year$RealMonth${Day}_$Hour${Minute}";   
        return $today;
    }
}

    [download]
[reply]
[d/l]
      This doesn't look like what the original poster was after, at all.
[reply]

      You should check out POSIX::strftime, too. :)

      use POSIX qw(strftime);

print "mm/dd/yyyy:\t".    strftime('%d/%m/%Y', localtime time) . $/;
print "yyyymmdd_hhmm:\t". strftime('%Y%m%d_%H%M', localtime time) . $/
+;

      [download]

      These also have the benefit of zero-padding the date and time components, so they will sort correctly if used in a filename (for example).

      mhoward - at - hattmoward.org
[reply]
[d/l]

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom