time ()

[Anonymous Monk]

Hi Perl Monks,

I am running into a small problem in my script, I am trying to work out the average time of something. Here is what I have done:

I use perl time() function to get the epoch seconds, i then update this whenever say an event happens by doing this:

#$restime is called from the database, which is the previos total.
 ...snip...
    $current_time = time();
    $res_time = $logtime - $current_time;
    $newtime = $res_time+$stime; 
 ...snip...

#I then update the database by inserting new time, next time the numbe
+r will grow again etc..

Now what I want to do is convert $newtime to something like 6 hours 4 minute and 30 seconds

Is this possible?

[hakkr]

use the localtime function

    ($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst) =
                                                localtime($newtime);

[gbarr]

Using localtime is fine if $newtime is a real time value. But from the description I assume it is a delta time. ie a value like 21870. Becasue of the zone offset, localtime would produce different results around the world. However gmtime() will always give what is wanted.

($seconds,$minutes,$hours,$days) = (gmtime($newtime))[0,1,2,7];

[clintp]

So essentially: you're subtracting the start time from the current time, both expressed in seconds. The result is a pile of seconds that then need to be translated to days, hours, minutes and leftover seconds. Right?

The DateCalc function in the Date::Manip module would do this. Beware, this is a heavyweight module. It might just be quicker to divide by 86400 (days), take the remainder and divide by 60*60 (hours), take the remainder and divide by 60 (minutes), and what's left is seconds.

[Fastolfe]

Implementers should note that a simple solution like this, while simple and usually perfectly adequate, will break with 'day', 'month' or 'year' labels across:
• Daylight Savings Time boundaries
• Month boundaries (given that months have varying days)
• Leap Year boundaries

[blakem]

Several approaches to this were discussed at Convert seconds into a formatted ddd:hh:mm:ss string. Perhaps one of them is what you are looking for.

-Blake