Formats for date.

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

Hello Monks... I am using date extraction in my scripts for comparison with Oracle database dates (in mm/dd/yyyy format). The script which I am using is

my ($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst)=localtime(tim
+e);
my $currSysDate;
my $currYear;
my $day;
$year = $year + 1900;
$mon = $mon+1;
$day = $mday;
if($mon <10){
    $mon ="0$mon";
}
if($day <10){
    $day ="0$day";
}
$currSysDate = join("/",$mon,$day,$year);
print "$year \n";
print "$currSysDate \n";
[download]

Now the question is that this does not seem to be a very good approach. as incase I try to increment the month just before the "join" the date will again have single digit month. So is there a better approach to simply get the date in mm/dd/yyyy format so that it can be compared with oracle database date format. Thanks

Comment on Formats for date. Download Code

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Re: Formats for date. by gellyfish (Monsignor) on Jun 28, 2005 at 21:33 UTC
See POSIX::strftime which allows you to format the date in one like: `POSIX::strftime("%m/%d/%Y", localtime);` [download] /J\	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Formats for date. by BaldPenguin (Friar) on Jun 28, 2005 at 21:48 UTC
You could also use: `$currSysDate = sprintf("%02d/%02d/%04d",$mon,$day,$year);` [download] But it should be noted that if you use this approach, no validation occurs. You could create a bad date; Don WHITEPAGES.COM \| INC Edit by castaway: Closed small tag in signature	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Formats for date. by ikegami (Patriarch) on Jun 28, 2005 at 21:51 UTC
Are you implying that `strftime` does validation? I can't find any documentation to support that. Validation isn't needed anyway, since he's printing out the result of `localtime`.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^3: Formats for date. by BaldPenguin (Friar) on Jun 28, 2005 at 23:21 UTC
Actually, what I was implying was that if the localtime was read and then a value such as month were to be incremented, then sprintf() would print out a bad date( i.e. 13/30/2005). You are correct in that passing localtime straight to strftime would not require validation, if any were to exist. Thanks. True validation could be accomplished using Date::Calc or DateTime or similar to increment the date values. Don WHITEPAGES.COM \| INC Edit by castaway: Closed small tag in signature	[reply]
Re: Formats for date. by shiza (Hermit) on Jun 28, 2005 at 23:58 UTC
I've found these modules to be very helpful when dealing with dates: Time::Piece, Date::Simple	[reply]
Re: Formats for date. by fmerges (Chaplain) on Jun 28, 2005 at 22:13 UTC
Hi, You can also say the Oracle that for your session you want another date output, for example if we were talking about a timestamp, you could get from the DB a timestamp in epoch so it is easier and faster to do comparisions later in your code. Salve,	[reply]