Re^4: Ovid's "Please Stop Using Perl 3" (Date::Manip)

Well I've never cared about the "slow" aspect, I often want it where I have a string which represents a "date and time" and I just pass it to ParseDate() and that "just works".

In many cases strptime would work and I might use that with strftime etc., if it was in core ... but it seems worthless to pull a module in for strptime, when I can just pull Date::Manip in instead.

How do you parse date/time strings?

--
And-httpd, $2,000 security guarantee
James Antill

Comment on Re^4: Ovid's "Please Stop Using Perl 3" (Date::Manip)

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Re^5: Ovid's "Please Stop Using Perl 3" (Date::Manip) by tye (Sage) on Sep 07, 2006 at 18:08 UTC
How do you parse date/time strings? I don't parse dates in unknown formats. Most date strings I deal with can be parsed with /(\d\d)/g, as it should be. On rare occasions I've worked with worse formats but the worst case was just building a simple hash of month abbreviations. When I do parse date strings, I usually parse one per line for tons of lines and so "slow" adds up quickly and so I probably wouldn't use Date::Manip. Thanks for pointing out how much else Date::Manip does well. - tye	[reply]
Re^6: Ovid's "Please Stop Using Perl 3" (Date::Manip) by nevyn (Monk) on Sep 07, 2006 at 20:29 UTC
I don't parse dates in unknown formats. Right, I guess I've probably done an above average number of scripts which do reports and take date arguments. A problem which ParseDate was basically written to solve. And thinking about it more, I have written a couple of things like my "And-httpd syslog" => "Apache-httpd combined log" converter, which are basically regexps + hash and they would be more painful to do with Date::Manip (and speed does matter). But implementing the "skip enteries before time X" option, without it, would be bad :). -- And-httpd, $2,000 security guarantee James Antill	[reply]