Re: [MacPerl-AnyPerl] Dates, times, and month names

[Eric Albert <ejalbert@cs.stanford.edu>]

At 1:07 AM -0500 3/29/1999, Ronald J. Kimball wrote:
>Eric Albert wrote:
>>
>> Anyway, I'm stuck with a Sybase database here (blech!).  Sybase's datetime
>> data type is returned from database calls as a string formatted like this:
>> 'Apr 26 1999  4:21:00:000PM'  It's always in that format -- "mon dd yyyy
>> hh:mm:sssPM" (or AM) if you read the field directly (yes, you can use
>> concatenated converts...not pretty, and I'm looking for a Perl solution so
>> I can abstract it better).
>
>Your example string is not consistent with that format...
>
> 4:21:00:000PM
>hh:mm:sssPM
>
>I'll assume it's a typo in the example string.

Laziness again - I didn't write out the complete regex because most
displays of date/time formats can generally be assumed to handle such
things properly.  I'd expect \d\d? for hours....

>> Now, I'm looking to convert this to a formatted string like that of
>> strftime, probably using Time::CTime, that looks like this "April 26, 1999
>> 4:21 PM".  That's trivial, except in the conversion from 'Apr' to 'April'.
>
>Because of the way this wrapped, I can't tell whether you want to
>preserve the space padding for the hour...

It's only the month that I care about...sorry if that wasn't more clear.

>> If I don't want to hardcode my months into a hash -- it'd be nice to avoid
>> it, just for reasons of laziness and curiousity -- is there any way to do
>> the translation?  It seems that timelocal and related functions all require
>> month *numbers*; does anything allow a name?
>>
>Well, the months have to be hardcoded somewhere, if not in your code then
>in the module you use to do it.

Obviously, until we build computers that know English.  The only question
is whether there is such a creature already....

>For a more general solution, you might be interested in the Date::Parse
>module.

Yep.  That seems to be exactly what I'd like, minus its inability to handle
milliseconds starting with ':' instead of '.'.  That's easily fixed by
changing (?:\.\d+)? to (?:[\.:]\d+)? on line 157, though.  Ah, the joy of
open source.... :)

Thanks for the suggestion,
Eric

--
Eric Albert                     ejalbert@cs.stanford.edu
http://www.stanford.edu/~ejalbert/

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