in reply to Re: Fast date parsing
in thread Fast date parsing

An excellent question. I'm not really algorithming.

I suppose I should have been more specific. I wish to translate the few million dates into unix seconds... So I'm using $us = &UnixDate( &ParseDate($_), '%s' );

Perhaps that is the slow part?

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Re^3: Fast date parsing
by dragonchild (Archbishop) on May 02, 2005 at 14:33 UTC
    Ok ... just out of curiousity - why aren't you batching this up and letting it run over a weekend?

    The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good.

[reply]

      (Several months late to the discussion, but for the benefit of other monks who might wander this way...)

      Date::Manip is slow for parsing dates that are in some regular (in the "consistent" sense) format. It's slow because it handles many, many date/time formats (and handles them well, in my experience). It'll handle "2005-11-03T10:00:00" and "Nov 3, 2005 at 10AM" and "today at 10AM". (Currently, these are all interpreted as the same date-time.) Even the author of the module suggests that Date::Manip is probably not the module you should be using.

      I came upon this thread after a log-parsing script I'd written was taking forever to finish. The log files I had listed dates in the form: DD/Mon/YEAR HH:MI:SS. With Date::Manip, parsing a 10,000-line file took 98 seconds. Using DateTime took 27. And, using Time::Local (plus a hash for the month names) reduced the total time to under 5 seconds.

      YMMV, but I wanted to point out that despite all its goodness, Date::Manip is slow and is often overkill.

[reply]

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