changing time date format.

[pglinx]

I have 2 fields being sent by a form 1 is the date in mm/dd/yy 2 is military time. What is the simpilist way to convert it from 08/24/06 09:30 to Wednesday, August 24th 9:30am I seem to be coming on to alot of very complicated ways I like simple...

[explorer]

A solution with the big DateTime module family

#!/usr/bin/perl -l
# 08/24/06 09:30 => Thursday, August 24th  9:30am

use DateTime::Format::Strptime;

my $format_input  = '%D %H:%M';
my $format_output = '%A, %B %eth %l:%M%P';

my $Strp = new DateTime::Format::Strptime(
  pattern     => $format_input,
  locale      => 'en_US',
  time_zone   => 'America/New_York',
);

## Start
my $date_time = '08/24/06 09:30';                # 1. Get the date/tim
+e
my $dt        = $Strp->parse_datetime( $date );  # 2. Convert to DateT
+ime object
my $newtime   = $dt->strftime( $format_output ); # 3. Output the new d
+ate/time
print $newtime;
## End

Updated: Solution with the Date::Format and Date::Parse modules

#!/usr/bin/perl -l
# 08/24/06 09:30 => Thursday, August 24th  9:30am

use Date::Parse;
use Date::Format;
use Date::Language;

my $format    = '%A, %B %o %l:%M%P';
my $language  = Date::Language->new('English');

## Start
my $date_time = '08/24/06 09:30';
my $time      = $language->str2time( $date_time );     # 1. Parse
my $newtime   = $language->time2str( $format, $time ); # 2. Output
print $newtime;
## End

[pglinx]

I used the updated solution but for some reason I get Thursday, August 24th 9:30P I get P for every time instead of am or pm Thanks

[davorg]

What operating system are you using? Support for the %P format code isn't universal. Take a look at the documentation for "strftime" on your system.

You could try using %p instead. Or, alternatively, just use the 24 hour clock (%k in place of %l in the output format string) - that's far more readable in my opinion.

Personally, I'd use the DateTime modules to solve this problem.

[pglinx]

Could you tell me which Date module this is exactly there seems to be many different ones out there.

[swampyankee]

Fairly similar questions have been asked quite often. I believe the generic answer is Date::Calc.

[aquarium]

i agree wholeheartedly with your sig. our software is becoming more and more sophisticated, and we've learned from the Y2K dramas....so why don't U.S. programmers learn once and for all to store dates in a database in international format, and apply U.S./european/other display format for display purposes only??!! I can't believe that the global company i work for still manages to churn out code in U.S. that only takes U.S. date format into consideration...WAKE UP drongos....not you..them.

[explorer]

Yeah!

I worked with NASA and all was simple... ALL files had date/times into their names in ISO8601 format...

Only run your favorite editor and to write:

use DateTime::Format::ISO8601;

[imp]

Date::Calc offers a huge variety of options for parsing and manipulating dates. This is good in that it can almost always do what you want.. and bad because the piece you want is buried among the 200 other features.

For a simple version you could also use split and strftime (provided by POSIX.

use POSIX qw(strftime);
use strict;
use warnings;
my $date = '08/24/06';
my $time = '09:30';

my ($month,$day,$year) = split /\//, $date;
my ($hour,$min) = split /:/, $time;
my $formatted = strftime("%A, %B %d %I:%M %p",0,$min,$hour,$day,$month
+,$year);
print $formatted, "\n";

[jdtoronto]

Whilst, as swampyankee suggests, Date::Calc is the Texas chainsaw date and time module, I find Time::Piece a somewhat lighter weight solution for many Date and Time needs.

jdtoronto

[Zaxo]

There's a lot to be said for a unified timestamp, in unix epoch time.