NAME
Date::Tiny - A date object, with as little code as possible
VERSION
version 1.07
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 necessary.
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.
USAGE
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.
METHODS
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 parameters. "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 parameters 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 conversions and
calculations.
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.
HISTORY
This module was written by Adam Kennedy in 2006. In 2016, David Golden
adopted it as a caretaker maintainer.
SEE ALSO
DateTime, DateTime::Tiny, Time::Tiny, Config::Tiny, ali.as
SUPPORT
Bugs / Feature Requests
Please report any bugs or feature requests through the issue tracker at
<https://github.com/dagolden/Date-Tiny/issues>. You will be notified
automatically of any progress on your issue.
Source Code
This is open source software. The code repository is available for
public review and contribution under the terms of the license.
<https://github.com/dagolden/Date-Tiny>
git clone https://github.com/dagolden/Date-Tiny.git
AUTHORS
* Adam Kennedy <adamk@cpan.org>
* David Golden <dagolden@cpan.org>
COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
This software is copyright (c) 2006 by Adam Kennedy.
This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.