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Time::Local(3)         User Contributed Perl Documentation        Time::Local(3)





NAME

       Time::Local - Efficiently compute time from local and GMT time


VERSION

       version 1.35


SYNOPSIS

           use Time::Local qw( timelocal_posix timegm_posix );

           my $time = timelocal_posix( $sec, $min, $hour, $mday, $mon, $year );
           my $time = timegm_posix( $sec, $min, $hour, $mday, $mon, $year );


DESCRIPTION

       This module provides functions that are the inverse of built-in perl
       functions "localtime()" and "gmtime()". They accept a date as a six-
       element array, and return the corresponding time(2) value in seconds
       since the system epoch (Midnight, January 1, 1970 GMT on Unix, for
       example). This value can be positive or negative, though POSIX only
       requires support for positive values, so dates before the system's epoch
       may not work on all operating systems.

       It is worth drawing particular attention to the expected ranges for the
       values provided. The value for the day of the month is the actual day
       (i.e. 1..31), while the month is the number of months since January
       (0..11). This is consistent with the values returned from "localtime()"
       and "gmtime()".


FUNCTIONS

   "timelocal_posix()" and "timegm_posix()"
       Since version 1.30.

       These functions are the exact inverse of Perl's built-in "localtime" and
       "gmtime" functions. That means that calling "timelocal_posix(
       localtime($value) )" will always give you the same $value you started
       with. The same applies to "timegm_posix( gmtime($value) )".

       The one exception is when the value returned from "localtime()"
       represents an ambiguous local time because of a DST change. See the
       documentation below for more details.

       These functions expect the year value to be the number of years since
       1900, which is what the "localtime()" and "gmtime()" built-ins returns.

       They perform range checking by default on the input $sec, $min, $hour,
       $mday, and $mon values and will croak (using "Carp::croak()") if given a
       value outside the allowed ranges.

       While it would be nice to make this the default behavior, that would
       almost certainly break a lot of code, so you must explicitly import these
       functions and use them instead of the default "timelocal()" and
       "timegm()".

       You are strongly encouraged to use these functions in any new code which
       uses this module. It will almost certainly make your code's behavior less
       surprising.

   "timelocal_modern()" and "timegm_modern()"
       Since version 1.27.

       When "Time::Local" was first written, it was a common practice to
       represent years as a two-digit value like 99 for 1999 or 1 for 2001. This
       caused all sorts of problems (google "Y2K problem" if you're very young)
       and developers eventually realized that this was a terrible idea.

       The default exports of "timelocal()" and "timegm()" do a complicated
       calculation when given a year value less than 1000. This leads to
       surprising results in many cases. See "Year Value Interpretation" for
       details.

       The "time*_modern()" functions do not do this year munging and simply
       take the year value as provided.

       They perform range checking by default on the input $sec, $min, $hour,
       $mday, and $mon values and will croak (using "Carp::croak()") if given a
       value outside the allowed ranges.

   "timelocal()" and "timegm()"
       This module exports two functions by default, "timelocal()" and
       "timegm()".

       They perform range checking by default on the input $sec, $min, $hour,
       $mday, and $mon values and will croak (using "Carp::croak()") if given a
       value outside the allowed ranges.

       Warning: The year value interpretation that these functions and their
       nocheck variants use will almost certainly lead to bugs in your code, if
       not now, then in the future. You are strongly discouraged from using
       these in new code, and you should convert old code to using either the
       *_posix or *_modern functions if possible.

   "timelocal_nocheck()" and "timegm_nocheck()"
       If you are working with data you know to be valid, you can use the
       "nocheck" variants, "timelocal_nocheck()" and "timegm_nocheck()". These
       variants must be explicitly imported.

       If you supply data which is not valid (month 27, second 1,000) the
       results will be unpredictable (so don't do that).

       Note that my benchmarks show that this is just a 3% speed increase over
       the checked versions, so unless calling "Time::Local" is the hottest spot
       in your application, using these nocheck variants is unlikely to have
       much impact on your application.

   Year Value Interpretation
       This does not apply to the *_posix or *_modern functions. Use those
       exports if you want to ensure consistent behavior as your code ages.

       Strictly speaking, the year should be specified in a form consistent with
       "localtime()", i.e. the offset from 1900. In order to make the
       interpretation of the year easier for humans, however, who are more
       accustomed to seeing years as two-digit or four-digit values, the
       following conventions are followed:

       o   Years greater than 999 are interpreted as being the actual year,
           rather than the offset from 1900. Thus, 1964 would indicate the year
           Martin Luther King won the Nobel prize, not the year 3864.

       o   Years in the range 100..999 are interpreted as offset from 1900, so
           that 112 indicates 2012. This rule also applies to years less than
           zero (but see note below regarding date range).

       o   Years in the range 0..99 are interpreted as shorthand for years in
           the rolling "current century," defined as 50 years on either side of
           the current year.  Thus, today, in 1999, 0 would refer to 2000, and
           45 to 2045, but 55 would refer to 1955. Twenty years from now, 55
           would instead refer to 2055. This is messy, but matches the way
           people currently think about two digit dates. Whenever possible, use
           an absolute four digit year instead.

       The scheme above allows interpretation of a wide range of dates,
       particularly if 4-digit years are used. But it also means that the
       behavior of your code changes as time passes, because the rolling
       "current century" changes each year.

   Limits of time_t
       On perl versions older than 5.12.0, the range of dates that can be
       actually be handled depends on the size of "time_t" (usually a signed
       integer) on the given platform. Currently, this is 32 bits for most
       systems, yielding an approximate range from Dec 1901 to Jan 2038.

       Both "timelocal()" and "timegm()" croak if given dates outside the
       supported range.

       As of version 5.12.0, perl has stopped using the time implementation of
       the operating system it's running on. Instead, it has its own
       implementation of those routines with a safe range of at least +/- 2**52
       (about 142 million years)

   Ambiguous Local Times (DST)
       Because of DST changes, there are many time zones where the same local
       time occurs for two different GMT times on the same day. For example, in
       the "Europe/Paris" time zone, the local time of 2001-10-28 02:30:00 can
       represent either 2001-10-28 00:30:00 GMT, or 2001-10-28 01:30:00 GMT.

       When given an ambiguous local time, the timelocal() function will always
       return the epoch for the earlier of the two possible GMT times.

   Non-Existent Local Times (DST)
       When a DST change causes a locale clock to skip one hour forward, there
       will be an hour's worth of local times that don't exist. Again, for the
       "Europe/Paris" time zone, the local clock jumped from 2001-03-25 01:59:59
       to 2001-03-25 03:00:00.

       If the "timelocal()" function is given a non-existent local time, it will
       simply return an epoch value for the time one hour later.

   Negative Epoch Values
       On perl version 5.12.0 and newer, negative epoch values are fully
       supported.

       On older versions of perl, negative epoch ("time_t") values, which are
       not officially supported by the POSIX standards, are known not to work on
       some systems. These include MacOS (pre-OSX) and Win32.

       On systems which do support negative epoch values, this module should be
       able to cope with dates before the start of the epoch, down the minimum
       value of time_t for the system.


IMPLEMENTATION

       These routines are quite efficient and yet are always guaranteed to agree
       with "localtime()" and "gmtime()". We manage this by caching the start
       times of any months we've seen before. If we know the start time of the
       month, we can always calculate any time within the month.  The start
       times are calculated using a mathematical formula. Unlike other
       algorithms that do multiple calls to "gmtime()".

       The "timelocal()" function is implemented using the same cache. We just
       assume that we're translating a GMT time, and then fudge it when we're
       done for the timezone and daylight savings arguments. Note that the
       timezone is evaluated for each date because countries occasionally change
       their official timezones.  Assuming that "localtime()" corrects for these
       changes, this routine will also be correct.


AUTHORS EMERITUS

       This module is based on a Perl 4 library, timelocal.pl, that was included
       with Perl 4.036, and was most likely written by Tom Christiansen.

       The current version was written by Graham Barr.


BUGS

       The whole scheme for interpreting two-digit years can be considered a
       bug.

       Bugs may be submitted at
       <https://github.com/houseabsolute/Time-Local/issues>.

       There is a mailing list available for users of this distribution,
       <mailto:datetime@perl.org>.


SOURCE

       The source code repository for Time-Local can be found at
       <https://github.com/houseabsolute/Time-Local>.


AUTHOR

       Dave Rolsky <autarch@urth.org>


CONTRIBUTORS

       o   Florian Ragwitz <rafl@debian.org>

       o   Gregory Oschwald <oschwald@gmail.com>

       o   J. Nick Koston <nick@cpanel.net>

       o   Tom Wyant <wyant@cpan.org>

       o   Unknown <unknown@example.com>


COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

       This software is copyright (c) 1997 - 2023 by Graham Barr & Dave Rolsky.

       This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the
       same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.

       The full text of the license can be found in the LICENSE file included
       with this distribution.



perl v5.34.1                       2023-04-29                     Time::Local(3)

time-local 1.350.0 - Generated Sun Apr 30 09:52:04 CDT 2023
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