NAME

Date::Parse::Modern - Provide string to unixtime conversions

DESCRIPTION

Date::Parse::Modern provides a single function strtotime() which takes a textual datetime string and returns a unixtime. Initial tests shows that Date::Parse::Modern is about 40% faster than Date::Parse. Part of this speed increase may be due to the fact that we don't support as many "unique" string formats.

Care was given to support the most modern style strings that you would commonly run in to in log files or on the internet. Some "weird" examples that Date::Parse supports but Date::Parse::Modern does not would be:

  21 dec 17:05
  2000 10:02:18 "GMT"
  20020722T100000Z
  2002-07-22 10:00 Z

Corner cases like this were purposely not implemented because they're not commonly used and it would affect performance of the more common strings.

USAGE

  use Date::Parse::Modern;

FUNCTIONS

strtotime($string)

  my $unixtime = strtotime('1979-02-24'); # 288691200

Date::Parse::Modern exports the strtotime() function automatically.

Simply feed strtotime() a string with some type of date or time in it, and it will return an integer unixtime. If the string is unparseable, or a weird error occurs, it will return undef.

All the "magic" in Date::Parse::Modern is done using regular expressions that look for common datetime formats. Common formats like YYYY-MM-DD and HH:II:SS are easily detected and converted to the appropriate formats. This allows the date or time to be found anywhere in the string, in (almost) any order. In all cases, the day of the week is ignored in the input string.

Note: Strings without a year are assumed to be in the current year. Example: May 15th, 10:15am

Note: Strings with only a date are assumed to be at the midnight. Example: 2023-01-15

Note: Strings with only time are assumed to be the current day. Example: 10:15am

Note: In strings with numeric and textual time zone offsets, the numeric is used. Example: 14 Nov 1994 11:34:32 -0500 (EST)

AUTHORS

Scott Baker <scott@perturb.org>