The things we do when we are in love!

Recently I saw a pretty postcard in a shop which had a list of dates on it as follows:

I love you on the 1st of January 2011
I love you on the 2nd of January 2011
I love you on the 3rd of January 2011
...
I love you on the 31st of December 2011
[download]

And it seemed a nice idea to send such a message by e-mail to my loved one.

Now I am a terrible typist and I am sure I will type many errors in such e-mail, so why not writing a script that does it for me?

Here is what I wrote:

# every day I love you
use Modern::Perl;
use Date::Calc::Iterator;
use Lingua::EN::Inflect qw/ORD/;

my @months =
  qw /January February March April May June July August September Octo
+ber November December/;
my $start =
  $ARGV[0] ? parse_date( $ARGV[0] ) : [ (localtime)[5] + 1900, (localt
+ime)[4] + 1, (localtime)[3] ];
my $end = $ARGV[1] ? parse_date( $ARGV[1] ) : [ $start->[0] + 1, $star
+t->[1], $start->[2] ];
my $i = Date::Calc::Iterator->new( from => $start, to => $end );

my @result;
my $day;
push @result, join ' ',
  'I love you on the', ORD( $day->[2] ), 'of', $months[ $day->[1] - 1 
+], "$day->[0]."
  while $day = $i->next;
pop @result unless $ARGV[1];    # drop the last one if the end is calc
+ulated by default

say for @result;

sub parse_date {
    my $date = shift;
    return undef unless $date;
    if ( $date =~ m/^(\d{2})[\/-]?(\d{2})[\/-]?(\d{4})$/ ) {
        return [ $3, $2, $1 + 0 ];
    }
    else {
        return undef;
    }
}
[download]

Usage is perl everyday.pl start_date end_date Dates are in the ddmmyyyy, dd-mm-yyyy or dd/mm/yyyy format. If you leave out end_date it will default to one year after start_date. If you also leave out start_date, it will default to today.