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From: lwall@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov (Larry Wall)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: Date/Time conversion
Message-ID: <1991May7.221323.7866@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov>
Date: 7 May 91 22:13:23 GMT
References: <1991May07.184931.19141@osh3.OSHA.GOV>
Reply-To: lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall)
Organization: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA
Lines: 29

In article <1991May07.184931.19141@osh3.OSHA.GOV> chip@osh3.OSHA.GOV (Chip Yamasaki) writes:
: I have a question on Date and Time conversions.  I am writing a Perl
: script to parse the UUCP logfiles to record the information in a
: database.  The logfiles contain the date and time information in a
: format like:
: 
: 5/6-0:09:49
: 
: I would like to be able to take this and turn it back into the Unix
: clock time (seconds since . . .).  If I have to I could load these
: values into a tm type structure, but I can't find a function for that
: either.
: 
: Does anybody out there have a function like this in their Perl library? 

Anyone with 4.0 does.  Incant this:

    ($thismon, $thisyear) = (localtime)[4,5];
    require 'timelocal.pl';
    ($mon,$mday,$hr,$mn,$sc) = $date =~ m#(\d+)/(\d+)-(\d+):(\d+):(\d+)#;
    $logyear = $thismon || $mon != 12 ? $thisyear : $thisyear - 1;
    $mon--;
    $secs_since_1970 = &timelocal($sc,$mn,$hr,$mday,$mon,$logyear);

The fancy stuff just lets you analyze a December log in January.  You might
need to pass an extra argument to &timelocal to account for Daylight
Savings Time.

Larry