Work Roster Calcuation

[Smaug]

Hello,

I have been out of this for some time and I'm now trying yet again to brush off the rust and get back to some coding, so please be patient.....
I need to be able to do some date arithmetic for a work roster. For this I would like to convert a series of dates into Unix Time so that I can easily add and subtract. The problem is the format I'm given the information as shown below:

 Mon - Fri { 07:00 - 18:00 }
 Sat { 08:00 - 16:00 }
 Sun { 09:00 - 13:00 }
 08/04/27 {}
 08/05/01 {}
 08/06/16 {}
 08/08/09 {}
 08/09/24 {}
 08/12/16 {}
 08/12/25 {}
 08/12/26 {}
 09/01/01 {}

What this means is all the hours from Monday to Friday between 07:00 and 18:00. (note: it could also read 7:00 AM - 6:00 PM)
Dates without times specified are holidays where no work is done.

So effectively I need to calculate the amount of working hours taken to complete a task which may take 3 weeks, but only include or exclude the hours as shown above.
I have looked at Date::Manip, but it has numerous warnings stating, "be sure that you REALLY need to use this module".

Should I be looking at something else?
Regards,
Smaug.

[Anonymous Monk]

DateTime is the blessed way to do it :)

Why use DateTime?

[ysth]

Some things need a chainsaw; others a hammer or a screwdriver.

[pc88mxer]

One word of advice -- when I first started to use DateTime I was confused by the fact that the difference of two DateTime objects was not directly convertible into a number of seconds.

What you'll probably want to do is use the ->utc_rd_as_seconds method to first convert the DateTime objects to seconds and then perform the subtraction. Alternatively, subtract_datetime_absolute might work, too, although the former method also ignores leap seconds which may be helpful.