When you mentioned it, I thought that strptime was exactly what I was looking for, but it's not actually part of the core POSIX module. It's just an extension.

XML::FeedPP doesn't allow the text representation of the time zone, so it wouldn't solve this particular problem. It would save me a lot of effort if I had started with something like this, but I'm doing this more to learn how to program around an RSS/podcast feed than to actually get the job done.

My main goal when I asked this question was to avoid introducing additional dependencies on the program rather than just to avoid DateTime. So, I'm not really looking for another module to do the job. I think that the answer is that Perl doesn't have this feature.

Thank you.

--
-- Ghodmode

http://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git?a=search&h=HEAD&st=grep&s=strptime

corelist Time::Piece

Time::Piece was first released with perl 5.009005
[download]

Perl does have that feature.

That is exactly what I was looking for. Unfortunately, it doesn't recognize all of the time zone specifiers.

Example:

use Time::Piece;

my $pubdate = "Thu, 11 Jun 2009 11:50:00 PDT";
my $t      = Time::Piece->strptime( "Thu, 11 Jun 2009 11:50:00 PDT", "
+%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %Z" );
my $offset = $t->tzoffset;

printf( "%s\n", $t );
printf( "%s\n", $t->tzoffset->seconds );
[download]

results in


ghodmode@home:perl ] ./timepiece.pl
garbage at end of string in strptime: PDT at /usr/lib/perl/5.10/Time/Piece.pm line 470.
Thu Jun 11 11:50:00 2009
0

I think I'm going to rely on the call to the shell's date for now. Later, if I want to make the program more portable, I'll probably just create a hash with a short list of time zone specifiers to convert them to the appropriate numeric offset. That would break if the program encountered a new zone, but it would work for my purposes.

Of course Date::Time is the right way to do it, but it's less portable because of the external dependency.

I like Time::Piece, though. I didn't know about this module and I anticipate using it a lot more in the future.

--
-- Ghodmode

Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.
-- Thomas Carlyle