[NCLUG] perl datestring to timestamp conversion ?

[Tkil]

>>>>> "Gabriel" == Gabriel Somlo <somlo at acns.colostate.edu> writes:

Gabriel> I'm trying to write a perl script that receives a bunch of
Gabriel> lines containing time stamps formatted like so:

Gabriel> 	YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss [utc]

Gabriel> Some of them have 'utc' at the end (and that means they're in UTC :)
Gabriel> and some don't (and they are to be considered local time for wherever
Gabriel> this script runs).

Gabriel> I need to convert these into the official "seconds since
Gabriel> '00:00:00 1970-01-01 UTC'" timestamp value.

search.cpan.org

Look for "date" and "parse".

Surprisingly enough, there's Date::Parse.  :)

(Some of the other Date:: modules, like Date::Calc and a few others,
have various skills at parsing formats, but Date::Parse does the trick
for me...)

To archive off mailing list posts, I use something like this:

| use Date::Parse qw(str2time);
|
| [...]
| 
|   while (<F>)
|   {
|     if (/^Date:\s+(.*)$/)
|     {
|       $date = $1;
|       last LINE;
|     }
|   }
|   close F
|     or warn "problem closing '$file': $!";
| 
|   unless ($date)
|   {
|     # i considered using the date from the last file, but there's no
|     # guarantee that they will be in sequential order.  this should be
|     # rare enough to where i can just deal with them individually.
|     warn "no date in '$file', skipping";
|     next FILE;
|   }
| 
|   print STDERR " date='$date'" if $DEBUG > 1;
| 
|   $@ = '';
| 
|   my $time_t = eval { str2time($date); };
| 
|   if ($@)
|   {
|     warn "str2time barfed on \"$date\": $@";
|     next FILE;
|   }
| 
|   unless (defined $time_t)
|   {
|     warn "couldn't parse '$date' in '$file', skipping";
|     next FILE;
|   }
| 
|   print STDERR "\n  time_t=$time_t" if $DEBUG > 1;
| 
|   # pick out the year and month from the "localtime" return values.
|   # adjust them appropriately, then format them:
|   my ($y, $m) = (localtime($time_t))[5, 4];
|   $y += 1900;
|   $m += 1;
|   my $yyyy_mm = sprintf "%04d-%02d", $y, $m;
| 
|   print STDERR " dest=$yyyy_mm\n" if $DEBUG > 1;

Good luck,
t.