Skip to Main Content
Perl Cookbook
book

Perl Cookbook

by Tom Christiansen, Nathan Torkington
August 1998
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
800 pages
39h 20m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Perl Cookbook

Converting Epoch Seconds to DMYHMS

Problem

You have a date and time in Epoch seconds, and you want to calculate individual DMYHMS values from it.

Solution

Use the localtime or gmtime functions, depending on whether you want the date and time in GMT or your local time zone.

($seconds, $minutes, $hours, $day_of_month, $month, $year,
    $wday, $yday, $isdst) = localtime($time);

The standard Time::timelocal and Time::gmtime modules override the localtime and gmtime functions to provide named access to the individual values.

use Time::localtime;        # or Time::gmtime
$tm = localtime($TIME);     # or gmtime($TIME)
$seconds = $tm->sec;
# ...

Discussion

The localtime and gmtime functions return strange year and month values; the year has 1900 subtracted from it, and is the month value for January. Be sure to correct the base values for year and month, as this example does:

($seconds, $minutes, $hours, $day_of_month, $month, $year,
    $wday, $yday, $isdst) = localtime($time);
printf("Dateline: %02d:%02d:%02d-%04d/%02d/%02d\n",
    $hours, $minutes, $seconds, $year+1900, $month+1,
    $day_of_month);

We could have used the Time::localtime module to avoid the temporary variables:

use Time::localtime;
$tm = localtime($time);
printf("Dateline: %02d:%02d:%02d-%04d/%02d/%02d\n",
    $tm->hour, $tm->min, $tm->sec, $tm->year+1900,
    $tm->mon+1, $tm->mday);

See Also

The localtime function in perlfunc(1) and Chapter 3 of Programming Perl; the documentation for the standard Time::localtime and Time::gmtime modules; convert in ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Perl in a Nutshell

Perl in a Nutshell

Nathan Patwardhan, Ellen Siever, Stephen Spainhour
Perl Best Practices

Perl Best Practices

Damian Conway
Mastering Perl

Mastering Perl

brian d foy
Perl Cookbook, 2nd Edition

Perl Cookbook, 2nd Edition

Tom Christiansen, Nathan Torkington

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 1565922433Supplemental ContentCatalog PageErrata