Re^3: Fast date parsing

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Re: Fast date parsing by benizi (Hermit) on Nov 03, 2005 at 16:29 UTC
(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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Re: Fast date parsing
by benizi (Hermit) on Nov 03, 2005 at 16:29 UTC

(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.

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