NAME

Date::PeriodParser - Turns English descriptions into time periods

SYNOPSIS

  use Date::PeriodParser;
  my ($midnight, $midday) = parse_period("this morning");
  my ($monday_am, $sunday_pm) = parse_period("this week");
  ... parse_period("sometime last September");
  ... parse_period("around two weeks ago");

DESCRIPTION

The subroutine parse_period attempts to turn the English description of a time period into a pair of Unix epoch times. As a famous man once said, "Of course, this is a heuristic, which is a fancy way of saying that it doesn't work". I'm happy with it, though. (or at least, I will be; this is currently very much a work in progress, and only knows about recent dates.)

If you enter something it can't parse, it'll return an error code and an explanation instead of two epoch time values. Error code -1 means "You entered gibberish", error code -2 means "you entered something ambiguous", and the explanation will tell you how to disambiguate it.

AUTHOR

Simon Cozens, simon@cpan.org