1Date::Tiny(3) User Contributed Perl Documentation Date::Tiny(3)
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6 Date::Tiny - A date object, with as little code as possible
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9 version 1.07
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12 # Create a date manually
13 $christmas = Date::Tiny->new(
14 year => 2006,
15 month => 12,
16 day => 25,
17 );
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19 # Show the current date
20 $today = Date::Tiny->now;
21 print "Year : " . $today->year . "\n";
22 print "Month: " . $today->month . "\n";
23 print "Day : " . $today->day . "\n";
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26 Date::Tiny is a member of the DateTime::Tiny suite of time modules.
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28 It implements an extremely lightweight object that represents a date,
29 without any time data.
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31 The Tiny Mandate
32 Many CPAN modules which provide the best implementation of a concept
33 can be very large. For some reason, this generally seems to be about 3
34 megabyte of ram usage to load the module.
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36 For a lot of the situations in which these large and comprehensive
37 implementations exist, some people will only need a small fraction of
38 the functionality, or only need this functionality in an ancillary
39 role.
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41 The aim of the Tiny modules is to implement an alternative to the large
42 module that implements a subset of the functionality, using as little
43 code as possible.
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45 Typically, this means a module that implements between 50% and 80% of
46 the features of the larger module, but using only 100 kilobytes of
47 code, which is about 1/30th of the larger module.
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49 The Concept of Tiny Date and Time
50 Due to the inherent complexity, Date and Time is intrinsically very
51 difficult to implement properly.
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53 The arguably only module to implement it completely correct is
54 DateTime. However, to implement it properly DateTime is quite slow and
55 requires 3-4 megabytes of memory to load.
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57 The challenge in implementing a Tiny equivalent to DateTime is to do so
58 without making the functionality critically flawed, and to carefully
59 select the subset of functionality to implement.
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61 If you look at where the main complexity and cost exists, you will find
62 that it is relatively cheap to represent a date or time as an object,
63 but much much more expensive to modify or convert the object.
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65 As a result, Date::Tiny provides the functionality required to
66 represent a date as an object, to stringify the date and to parse it
67 back in, but does not allow you to modify the dates.
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69 The purpose of this is to allow for date object representations in
70 situations like log parsing and fast real-time work.
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72 The problem with this is that having no ability to modify date limits
73 the usefulness greatly.
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75 To make up for this, if you have DateTime installed, any Date::Tiny
76 module can be inflated into the equivalent DateTime as needing, loading
77 DateTime on the fly if necessary.
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79 For the purposes of date/time logic, all Date::Tiny objects exist in
80 the "C" locale, and the "floating" time zone (although obviously in a
81 pure date context, the time zone largely doesn't matter).
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83 When converting up to full DateTime objects, these local and time zone
84 settings will be applied (although an ability is provided to override
85 this).
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87 In addition, the implementation is strictly correct and is intended to
88 be very easily to sub-class for specific purposes of your own.
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91 In general, the intent is that the API be as close as possible to the
92 API for DateTime. Except, of course, that this module implements less
93 of it.
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96 new
97 my $date = Date::Tiny->new(
98 year => 2006,
99 month => 12,
100 day => 31,
101 );
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103 The "new" constructor creates a new Date::Tiny object.
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105 It takes three named parameters. "day" should be the day of the month
106 (1-31), "month" should be the month of the year (1-12), "year" as a 4
107 digit year.
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109 These are the only parameters accepted.
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111 Returns a new Date::Tiny object.
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113 now
114 my $current_date = Date::Tiny->now;
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116 The "now" method creates a new date object for the current date.
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118 The date created will be based on localtime, despite the fact that the
119 date is created in the floating time zone.
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121 Returns a new Date::Tiny object.
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123 year
124 The "year" accessor returns the 4-digit year for the date.
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126 month
127 The "month" accessor returns the 1-12 month of the year for the date.
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129 day
130 The "day" accessor returns the 1-31 day of the month for the date.
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132 ymd
133 The "ymd" method returns the most common and accurate stringified date
134 format, which returns in the form "2006-04-12".
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136 as_string
137 The "as_string" method converts the date to the default string, which
138 at present is the same as that returned by the "ymd" method above.
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140 This string matches the ISO 8601 standard for the encoding of a date as
141 a string.
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143 from_string
144 The "from_string" method creates a new Date::Tiny object from a string.
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146 The string is expected to be a "yyyy-mm-dd" ISO 8601 time string.
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148 my $almost_christmas = Date::Tiny->from_string( '2006-12-23' );
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150 Returns a new Date::Tiny object, or throws an exception on error.
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152 DateTime
153 The "DateTime" method is used to create a DateTime object that is
154 equivalent to the Date::Tiny object, for use in conversions and
155 calculations.
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157 As mentioned earlier, the object will be set to the 'C' locate, and the
158 'floating' time zone.
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160 If installed, the DateTime module will be loaded automatically.
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162 Returns a DateTime object, or throws an exception if DateTime is not
163 installed on the current host.
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166 This module was written by Adam Kennedy in 2006. In 2016, David Golden
167 adopted it as a caretaker maintainer.
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170 DateTime, DateTime::Tiny, Time::Tiny, Config::Tiny, ali.as
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173 Bugs / Feature Requests
174 Please report any bugs or feature requests through the issue tracker at
175 <https://github.com/dagolden/Date-Tiny/issues>. You will be notified
176 automatically of any progress on your issue.
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178 Source Code
179 This is open source software. The code repository is available for
180 public review and contribution under the terms of the license.
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182 <https://github.com/dagolden/Date-Tiny>
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184 git clone https://github.com/dagolden/Date-Tiny.git
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187 · Adam Kennedy <adamk@cpan.org>
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189 · David Golden <dagolden@cpan.org>
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192 This software is copyright (c) 2006 by Adam Kennedy.
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194 This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
195 the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.
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199perl v5.30.0 2019-07-26 Date::Tiny(3)