NAME

Email::Date - Find and Format Date Headers

SYNOPSIS

  use Email::Date;
  
  my $email = join '', <>;
  my $date  = find_date($email);
  print $date->ymd;
  
  my $header = format_date($date->epoch);
  
  Email::Simple->create(
      header => [
          Date => $header,
      ],
      body => '...',
  );

DESCRIPTION

RFC 2822 defines the Date: header. It declares the header a required part of an email message. The syntax for date headers is clearly laid out. Stil, even a perfectly planned world has storms. The truth is, many programs get it wrong. Very wrong. Or, they don't include a Date: header at all. This often forces you to look elsewhere for the date, and hoping to find something.

For this reason, the tedious process of looking for a valid date has been encapsulated in this software. Further, the process of creating RFC compliant date strings is also found in this software.

FUNCTIONS

find_date

  my $time_piece = find_date $email;

find_date accepts an email message in any format Email::Abstract can understand. It looks through the email message and finds a date, converting it to a Time::Piece object.

If it can't find a date, it returns false.

find_date is exported by default.

format_date

  my $date = format_date; # now
  my $date = format_date( time - 60*60 ); # one hour ago

format_date accepts an epoch value, such as the one returned by time. It returns a string representing the date and time of the input, as specified in RFC 2822. If no input value is provided, the current value of time is used.

format_date is exported by default.

format_gmdate

  my $date = format_gmdate;

format_gmdate is identical to format_date, but it will return a string indicating the time in Greenwich Mean Time, rather than local time.

format_gmdate is exported on demand, but not by default.

PERL EMAIL PROJECT

This module is maintained by the Perl Email Project

http://emailproject.perl.org/wiki/Email::Date

SEE ALSO

Email::Abstract, Time::Piece, Date::Parse, perl.

AUTHOR

Casey West, <casey@geeknest.com>.

Ricardo SIGNES, <rjbs@cpan.org>.

COPYRIGHT

  Copyright (c) 2004 Casey West.  All rights reserved.
  This module is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
  under the same terms as Perl itself.