Re: Writing localized Perl apps

[BigLug]

When working with Dates, your best bet for localization (or localisation, depending on your locale), is the DateTime suite of modules. The DateTime project has been anally-retentive with it's dates. Not only does it use the Olsen Time Zone database to make sure it moves to and from DST at the right time this year, but it does it at the right time back to 1972, so if your local laws have changed, so has the database.

However that's not what you asked about.

The other thing that DateTime handles is locales. For this, it has used the Common XML Locale Repository project. So, once you have your DateTime object, all you need to do is set the locale and output it with strftime. All the strftime functions are localised, so getting the month name will always return the name in the current locale. The %c token is the default date-and-time format for the locale:

use DateTime;

$dt = DateTime->now();

print $dt->set( locale => 'en' )->strftime('%c') . "\n";
# May 2, 2004 9:45:18 PM

print $dt->set( locale => 'en_AU' )->strftime('%c') . "\n";
# 02/05/2004 9:45:18 PM

print $dt->set( locale => 'es' )->strftime('%c') . "\n";
# 02-may-04 21:45:18

print $dt->set( locale => 'fr' )->strftime('%c') . "\n";
# 2 mai 04 21:45:18

print $dt->set( locale => 'it' )->strftime('%c') . "\n";
# 02/mag/04 21:45:18

print $dt->set( locale => 'no' )->strftime('%c') . "\n";
# 02.mai.04 21:45:18