libdate-manip-perl

Date::Manip is a series of modules designed to make any common date/time operation easy to do. Operations such as comparing two times, determining a date a given amount of time from another, or parsing international times are all easily done. It deals with time as it is used in the Gregorian calendar (the one currently in use) with full support for time changes due to daylight saving time. From the very beginning, the main focus of Date::Manip has been to be able to do ANY desired date/time operation easily. Many other modules exist which may do a subset of these operations quicker or more efficiently, but no other module can do all of the operations available in Date::Manip. Date::Manip has functionality to work with several fundamental types of data. * *dates* The word date is used extensively here and is somewhat misleading. In Date::Manip, a date consists of three pieces of information: a calendar date (year, month, day), a time of day (hour, minute, second), and time zone information. Calendar dates and times are fully handled. Time zones are handled as well, but depending on how you use Date::Manip, there may be some limitations as discussed below. * *delta* A delta is an amount of time (i.e. the amount of time between two different dates). Think of it as the duration of an event or the amount of time between two dates. A delta refers only to an amount of time. It includes no information about a starting or ending date/time. Most people will think of a delta as an amount of time, but the term 'time' is already used so much in this module that I didn't want to use it here in order to avoid confusion. * *recurrence* A recurring event is something which occurs on a regular recurring basis. * *holidays* and *events* Holidays and events are basically named dates or recurrences. Among other things, Date::Manip allow you to: * *** Enter a date in practically any format you choose. * *** Compare two dates, entered in widely different formats to determine which is earlier. * *** Extract any information you want from a date using a format string similar to the Unix date command. * *** Determine the amount of time between two dates, or add an amount of time (a delta) to a date to get a second date. * *** Work with dates using international formats (foreign month names, 12/10/95 referring to October rather than December, etc.). * *** Convert dates from one timezone to another. * *** To find a list of dates where a recurring event happens. Each of these tasks is trivial (one or two lines at most) with this package.