[NCLUG] perl datestring to timestamp conversion ?
Gabriel Somlo
somlo at acns.colostate.edu
Mon Jan 10 11:24:34 MST 2005
Hi,
I'm trying to write a perl script that receives a bunch of lines
containing time stamps formatted like so:
YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss [utc]
Some of them have 'utc' at the end (and that means they're in UTC :)
and some don't (and they are to be considered local time for wherever
this script runs).
I need to convert these into the official "seconds since '00:00:00
1970-01-01 UTC'" timestamp value.
I've tried POSIX::mktime, like so:
my $timestamp = POSIX::mktime( $ss, $mm, $hh,
$DD, $MM-1, $YYYY-1900,
0, 0, -1 );
and this handles all local time conversions fine. The -1 for the last
argument is to get it to automagically handle daylight savings time.
How can I get it to switch between local time (which is all it does
now) to UTC, so I can handle the lines that are given in UTC ?
Right now, I'm doing it like so:
my $utc = ( $is_utc_entry ) ? 'utc' : '';
my $timestamp = qx/date -d "$YYYY-$MM-$DD $hh:$mm:$ss $utc" +%s/;
and let the 'date' program handle it. However, this script should be
portable, and run on weird things other than linux, where 'date'
doesn't have the %s option. Also, it would be nice if I didn't have to
ask various admins to install any extra perl modules :)
Thanks a ton for any ideas !
Gabriel
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