Perl date modification

ronniec posted this at 20:27 — 9th March 2001.

They have: 5 posts

Joined: Mar 2001

Hi,
I have a great guestbook script, except for one thing. It uses this line to get the date:

$the_date=localtime();

localtime() outputs the date and time where the server is, in this format:

Thu Mar 8 12:49:43 2001

Does anyone know if/how I can change the format of the ouputted string e.g. print "8/3/01, 12:49" instead (for example)? And can you modify localtime() to print the time in your own time zone?

Thanks for anything in advance.

[email protected]
Ronnie's Homepage

Mark Hensler posted this at 22:39 — 9th March 2001.

He has: 4,048 posts

Joined: Aug 2000

($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst) = gmtime(time);
$year = substr($year,1);   #make $year two digit
$the_date = "$mon/$mday/$year, $hour:$min";

'
interesting links:
http://www.perl.com/pub/doc/manual/html/pod/perlfunc/gmtime.html

Mark Hensler
If there is no answer on Google, then there is no question.

japhy posted this at 14:26 — 10th March 2001.

They have: 161 posts

Joined: Dec 1999

You can get the arguments of localtime() or gmtime() in a list (as the documentation states) and play with them as you need.

my ($min,$hour,$day,$mon,$year) = (localtime)[1..5];
 
my $datestr = sprintf "%02d/%02d/%02d, %02d:%02d", $day, $mon+1, $year % 100, $hour, $min;

You can also use the POSIX strftime function:

use POSIX 'strftime';
my $datestr = strftime('%d/%m/%y, %R', localtime);

Perl should be doing it for your specific time zone when you use localtime().

ronniec posted this at 21:00 — 10th March 2001.

They have: 5 posts

Joined: Mar 2001

Thanks to you both for the help.