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



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 timezome.

       strptime(DATE [, ZONE])
           "strptime" takes the same arguments as str2time but returns an array of values
           "($ss,$mm,$hh,$day,$month,$year,$zone)". 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 are 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

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 Graham Barr. All rights reserved. This program is free software; you can
       redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

POD ERRORS
       Hey! The above document had some coding errors, which are explained below:

       Around line 323:
           You forgot a '=back' before '=head1'



perl v5.8.8                                      2003-06-03                                   Date::Parse(3)