NAME
    Date::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";

DESCRIPTION
    Date::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>

    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.