Date::Tiny(3) User Contributed Perl Documentation Date::Tiny(3)NAMEDate::Tiny - A date object with as little code as possible
SYNOPSIS
# Create a date manually
$christmas = Date::Tiny->new(
year => 2006,
month => 12,
day => 25,
);
# Show the current date
$today = Date::Tiny->now;
print "Year : " . $today->year . "\n";
print "Month: " . $today->month . "\n";
print "Day : " . $today->day . "\n";
DESCRIPTIONDate::Tiny is a member of the DateTime::Tiny suite of time modules.
It implements an extremely lightweight object that represents a date,
without any time data.
The Tiny Mandate
Many CPAN modules which provide the best implementation of a concept
can be very large. For some reason, this generally seems to be about 3
megabyte of ram usage to load the module.
For a lot of the situations in which these large and comprehensive
implementations exist, some people will only need a small fraction of
the functionality, or only need this functionality in an ancillary
role.
The aim of the Tiny modules is to implement an alternative to the large
module that implements a subset of the functionality, using as little
code as possible.
Typically, this means a module that implements between 50% and 80% of
the features of the larger module, but using only 100 kilobytes of
code, which is about 1/30th of the larger module.
The Concept of Tiny Date and Time
Due to the inherent complexity, Date and Time is intrinsically very
difficult to implement properly.
The arguably only module to implement it completely correct is
DateTime. However, to implement it properly DateTime is quite slow and
requires 3-4 megabytes of memory to load.
The challenge in implementing a Tiny equivalent to DateTime is to do so
without making the functionality critically flawed, and to carefully
select the subset of functionality to implement.
If you look at where the main complexity and cost exists, you will find
that it is relatively cheap to represent a date or time as an object,
but much much more expensive to modify or convert the object.
As a result, Date::Tiny provides the functionality required to
represent a date as an object, to stringify the date and to parse it
back in, but does not allow you to modify the dates.
The purpose of this is to allow for date object representations in
situations like log parsing and fast real-time work.
The problem with this is that having no ability to modify date limits
the usefulness greatly.
To make up for this, if you have DateTime installed, any Date::Tiny
module can be inflated into the equivalent DateTime as needing, loading
DateTime on the fly if necesary.
For the purposes of date/time logic, all Date::Tiny objects exist in
the "C" locale, and the "floating" time zone (although obviously in a
pure date context, the time zone largely doesn't matter).
When converting up to full DateTime objects, these local and time zone
settings will be applied (although an ability is provided to override
this).
In addition, the implementation is strictly correct and is intended to
be very easily to sub-class for specific purposes of your own.
METHODS
In general, the intent is that the API be as close as possible to the
API for DateTime. Except, of course, that this module implements less
of it.
new
my $date = Date::Tiny->new(
year => 2006,
month => 12,
day => 31,
);
The "new" constructor creates a new Date::Tiny object.
It takes three named params. "day" should be the day of the month
(1-31), "month" should be the month of the year (1-12), "year" as a 4
digit year.
These are the only params accepted.
Returns a new Date::Tiny object.
now
my $current_date = Date::Tiny->now;
The "now" method creates a new date object for the current date.
The date created will be based on localtime, despite the fact that the
date is created in the floating time zone.
Returns a new Date::Tiny object.
year
The "year" accessor returns the 4-digit year for the date.
month
The "month" accessor returns the 1-12 month of the year for the date.
day
The "day" accessor returns the 1-31 day of the month for the date.
ymd
The "ymd" method returns the most common and accurate stringified date
format, which returns in the form "2006-04-12".
as_string
The "as_string" method converts the date to the default string, which
at present is the same as that returned by the "ymd" method above.
This string matches the ISO 8601 standard for the encoding of a date as
a string.
from_string
The "from_string" method creates a new Date::Tiny object from a string.
The string is expected to be a "yyyy-mm-dd" ISO 8601 time string.
my $almost_christmas = Date::Tiny->from_string( '2006-12-23' );
Returns a new Date::Tiny object, or throws an exception on error.
DateTime
The "DateTime" method is used to create a DateTime object that is
equivalent to the Date::Tiny object, for use in comversions and
caluculations.
As mentioned earlier, the object will be set to the 'C' locate, and the
'floating' time zone.
If installed, the DateTime module will be loaded automatically.
Returns a DateTime object, or throws an exception if DateTime is not
installed on the current host.
SUPPORT
Bugs should be reported via the CPAN bug tracker at
http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/ReportBug.html?Queue=Date-Tiny
<http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/ReportBug.html?Queue=Date-Tiny>
For other issues, or commercial enhancement or support, contact the
author.
AUTHOR
Adam Kennedy <adamk@cpan.org>
SEE ALSO
DateTime, DateTime::Tiny, Time::Tiny, Config::Tiny, ali.as
COPYRIGHT
Copyright 2006 - 2009 Adam Kennedy.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the same terms as Perl itself.
The full text of the license can be found in the LICENSE file included
with this module.
perl v5.14.0 2009-04-20 Date::Tiny(3)