Time Question

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

I have a requirement to switch logo's depending on the time of day and the sitecode being used, so that if during business hours a chat is offered if after a phone number is displayed. Initially I thought I could do this with an

<xsl:if> statement but its not working at all like I expected nothing 
+is being displayed regardless of results of the new if test.
[download]

so I thought how about making a modified transform hardcoding my other logo (graphic 2 whatever) and then calling that based on time..not elegant but needs to get done real quick for the client so I was wondering how the heck do I check the time? this is probably simple but I can't figure how to determine what time it is other than looking at my watch like an idiot. I know my xp will probably all vanish and I will be banished to negativeland.

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Re: Time Question by kyle (Abbot) on Jan 15, 2009 at 02:47 UTC
Is this a Perl question? In Perl, look at time, localtime, and/or DateTime.	[reply]
Re: Time Question by ww (Archbishop) on Jan 15, 2009 at 03:21 UTC
Others have provided alternatives to looking at your watch. The coding, if inelegant, is straightforward: `#!/usr/bin/perl -lw use strict; my $open = 0; my $hour = 0; my $x = localtime; # $x was "Wed Jan 14 21:59:45 2009" as this was written if ( $x=~ /(Mon\|Tue\|Wed\|Thu\|Fri)\s\w{3}\s\d{1,2}\s(\d\d):/ ) { my $weekday = $1; $hour = $2; } if ( (7 <= $hour) && ($hour < 17) ) { my $open = 1; print "Open is true"; # debug only # print <img src = "open.gif" ...; } else { #print <img src = "closed.gif ...; print "Live chat available 7am - 5pm (appropriate TZ)"; }` [download] integrating with `CGI` is left as an exercise... Afterthought: Of course (duh!) you'll also have to test for holidays which might be accomplished by testing (with another regex) `localtime` against a hash of `holiday_name = holiday_date`, updated each year. Update: Fixed day names.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Time Question by eighty-one (Curate) on Jan 15, 2009 at 03:12 UTC
time - perldoc.perl.org localtime - How to tell the current time in Perl The Many Dates and Times of Perl Those links should give you all the info you need. I especially recommend the last one; it's very helpful.	[reply]
Re: Time Question by dHarry (Abbot) on Jan 15, 2009 at 11:02 UTC
You give about zero details and it seems completely unrelated to Perl. If you use (E)XSLT and you want the date/time you could consider the `date:date-time()` function. Though it depends on your XSLT processor implementation/version if this function is actually implemented. See for example EXSLT for an XML-ish solution to your problem. HTP dHarry	[reply] [d/l]