dwww Home | Manual pages | Find package

Date::Parse(3pm)      User Contributed Perl Documentation     Date::Parse(3pm)

NAME
       Date::Parse - Parse date strings into time values

SYNOPSIS
               use Date::Parse;

               $time = str2time($date);

               ($ss,$mm,$hh,$day,$month,$year,$zone) = strptime($date);

DESCRIPTION
       "Date::Parse" provides two routines for parsing date strings into time
       values.

       str2time(DATE [, ZONE])
           "str2time"  parses  "DATE"  and returns a unix time value, or undef
           upon failure.  "ZONE", if given, specifies the timezone  to  assume
           when parsing if the date string does not specify a timezone.

       strptime(DATE [, ZONE])
           "strptime"  takes  the  same  arguments  as str2time but returns an
           array of  values  "($ss,$mm,$hh,$day,$month,$year,$zone,$century)".
           Elements  are only defined if they could be extracted from the date
           string. The $zone element is the timezone offset  in  seconds  from
           GMT. An empty array is returned upon failure.

MULTI-LANGUAGE SUPPORT
       Date::Parse  is  capable  of  parsing dates in several languages, these
       include English, French, German and Italian.

               $lang = Date::Language->new('German');
               $lang->str2time("25 Jun 1996 21:09:55 +0100");

EXAMPLE DATES
       Below is a sample list of dates that are  known  to  be  parsable  with
       Date::Parse

        1995:01:24T09:08:17.1823213           ISO-8601
        1995-01-24T09:08:17.1823213
        Wed, 16 Jun 94 07:29:35 CST           Comma and day name are optional
        Thu, 13 Oct 94 10:13:13 -0700
        Wed, 9 Nov 1994 09:50:32 -0500 (EST)  Text in ()'s will be ignored.
        21 dec 17:05                          Will be parsed in the current time zone
        21-dec 17:05
        21/dec 17:05
        21/dec/93 17:05
        1999 10:02:18 "GMT"
        16 Nov 94 22:28:20 PST

LIMITATION
       Date::Parse  uses Time::Local internally, so is limited to only parsing
       dates which result in valid  values  for  Time::Local::timelocal.  This
       generally  means  dates  between 1901-12-17 00:00:00 GMT and 2038-01-16
       23:59:59 GMT

BUGS
       When both the month and the date are specified in the date  as  numbers
       they  are always parsed assuming that the month number comes before the
       date. This is the usual format used in American dates.

       The reason why it is like this and not  dynamic  is  that  it  must  be
       deterministic.  Several people have suggested using the current locale,
       but this will not work as the date being  parsed  may  not  be  in  the
       format of the current locale.

       My  plans  to  address  this,  which will be in a future release, is to
       allow the programmer to state what order they want these values  parsed
       in.

AUTHOR
       Graham Barr <gbarr@pobox.com>

COPYRIGHT
       Copyright (c) 1995-2009 Graham Barr. This program is free software; you
       can  redistribute  it  and/or  modify  it  under the same terms as Perl
       itself.

perl v5.32.1                      2021-02-15                  Date::Parse(3pm)

Generated by dwww version 1.16 on Tue Dec 16 05:59:17 CET 2025.