Date::Manip::Changes5 - backward incompatible changes in Date::Manip 5.xx
This describes all backwards incompatible changes made to the Date::Manip module in the 5.xx series of releases.
For the most part, Date::Manip has remained backward compatible at every release, but occasionally, a change is made which is backward incompatible. These are documented here. Major changes are marked with asterisks.
The behavior of some elements of recurrences changed. These included making the week element (N) refer to the Nth occurrence of a day of the week in the week, month, or year. It is now possible to look at the 3rd Friday of every month for example.
The %x format used to be equivalent to %D (%m/%d/%y), but it has been modified to use the DateFormat config variable, so it may return %d/%m/%y if a non-US DateFormat is specified.
Since ":" is used in some VMS paths, it should not have been used as the path separator. It has been changed to a newline ("\n") character.
The entire delta is exact if no month component is present (previously, no year or month component could be present).
The Date_DaysSince999 function (deprecated in 5.35) has been removed.
In fixing support for the years 0001-0999, I rewrote Date_DaysSince999 to be Date_DaysSince1BC. The Date_DaysSince999 function will be removed.
In order to better support Win32 platforms, I added the PathSep config variable. This will allow the use of paths such as "c:\date" on Win32 platforms. Old config files on Win32 platforms (which were not working correctly in many cases) may not work if they contain path information to the personal config file.
Previously, Date::Manip variables were declared using a full package name. Now, they are declared with the my() function. This means that internal variables are no longer accessible outside of the module.
A business mode delta containing a week value used to be treated as 7 days. A much more likely interpretation of a week is Monday to Monday, regardless of holidays, so this is now the behavior.
The %z UnixDate format used to return the time zone abbreviation. It now returns it as a GMT offset (i.e. -0500). %Z still returns the time zone abbreviation.
The date "22nd Sunday" used to return the Sunday of the 22nd week of the year (which could be the 21st, 22nd, or 23rd Sunday of the year depending on how weeks were defined). Now, it returns the 22nd Sunday of the year regardless.
Previously, the date "Dec1065" would return Dec 10, 1965. After adding the YYYYmmm and mmmYYYY formats, this was no longer possible. The separator between DD and YY is no longer optional, so
Dec1065 returns December 1, 1065 Dec10/65 returns December 10, 1965
This is not a backwards incompatibility... but is added to help prepare for a future incompatibility. In one of the next versions of Date::Manip, the internal format of the date will change to include time zone information. All date comparisons should be made using Date_Cmp (which currently does nothing more than call the Perl "cmp" command, but which will important when comparing dates that include the time zone).
The old style Date_Init arguments that were deprecated in version 5.07 have been removed.
Changed .DateManip.cnf to Manip.cnf (to get rid of problems on OS's that insist on 8.3 filenames) for all non-Unix platforms (Windows, VMS, Mac). For all Unix platforms, it's still .DateManip.cnf . It will only look in the user's home directory on VMS and Unix.
A week field has been added to the internal format of the delta. It now reads "Y:M:W:D:H:MN:S" instead of "Y:M:D:H:MN:S".
A process that runs during a time zone change (Daylight Saving Time specifically) may report the wrong time zone. See the UpdateCurrTZ variable for more information.
The %J, %W, and %U will no longer report a week 0 or a week 53 if it should really be week 1 of the following year. They now report the correct week number according to ISO 8601.
Full support for ISO 8601 formats was added. As a result, some formats which previously worked may no longer be parsed since they conflict with an ISO 8601 format. These include MM-DD-YY (conflicts with YY-MM-DD) and YYMMDD (conflicts with YYYYMM). MM/DD/YY still works, so the first form can be kept easily by changing "-" to "/". YYMMDD can be changed to YY-MM-DD before being parsed. Whenever parsing dates using dashes as separators, they will be treated as ISO 8601 dates. You can get around this by converting all dashes to slashes.
The day numbering was changed from 0-6 (sun-sat) to 1-7 (mon-sun) to be ISO 8601 compatible. Weeks start on Monday (though this can be overridden using the FirstDay config variable) and the 1st week of the year contains Jan 4 (though it can be forced to contain Jan 1 with the Jan1Week1 config variable).
Used to return the number of seconds since 1/1/1970 in the current time zone. It now returns the number of seconds since 1/1/1970 GMT. The "%o" format was added which returns what "%s" previously did.
The format for the deltas returned by ParseDateDelta changed. Previously, each element of a delta had a sign attached to it (+1:+2:+3:+4:+5:+6). The new format removes all unnecessary signs by default (+1:2:3:4:5:6). Also, because of the way deltas are normalized (see documentation on ParseDateDelta), at most two signs are included. For backwards compatibility, the config variable DeltaSigns was added. If set to 1, all deltas include all 6 signs.
The format of the Date_Init calling arguments changed. The old method
Date_Init($language,$format,$tz,$convtz);
is still supported , but this support will likely disappear in the future. Use the new calling format instead:
Date_Init("var=val","var=val",...);
NOTE: The old format is no longer supported as of version 5.32 .
Please refer to the Date::Manip::Problems documentation for information on submitting bug reports or questions to the author.
Date::Manip - main module documentation
This script is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.
Sullivan Beck (sbeck@cpan.org)
To install Date::Manip, copy and paste the appropriate command in to your terminal.
cpanm
cpanm Date::Manip
CPAN shell
perl -MCPAN -e shell install Date::Manip
For more information on module installation, please visit the detailed CPAN module installation guide.