Quickly getting to YYYY-mm-dd HH:MM:SS in Perl

Use strftime in the standard POSIX module. The arguments to strftime in Perl’s binding were designed to align with the return values from localtime and gmtime. Compare

strftime(fmt, sec, min, hour, mday, mon, year, wday = -1, yday = -1, isdst = -1)

with

my          ($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,     $yday,     $isdst) = gmtime(time);

Example command-line use is

$ perl -MPOSIX -le 'print strftime "%F %T", localtime $^T'

or from a source file as in

use POSIX;

print strftime "%F %T", localtime time;

Some systems do not support the %F and %T shorthands, so you will have to be explicit with

print strftime "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S", localtime time;

or

print strftime "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S", gmtime time;

Note that time returns the current time when called whereas $^T is fixed to the time when your program started. With gmtime, the return value is the current time in GMT. Retrieve time in your local timezone with localtime.

Why not use the DateTime module to do the dirty work for you? It's easy to write and remember!

use strict;
use warnings;
use DateTime;

my $dt   = DateTime->now;   # Stores current date and time as datetime object
my $date = $dt->ymd;   # Retrieves date as a string in 'yyyy-mm-dd' format
my $time = $dt->hms;   # Retrieves time as a string in 'hh:mm:ss' format

my $wanted = "$date $time";   # creates 'yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss' string
print $wanted;

Once you know what's going on, you can get rid of the temps and save a few lines of code:

use strict;
use warnings;
use DateTime;

my $dt = DateTime->now;
print join ' ', $dt->ymd, $dt->hms;

Try this:

use POSIX qw/strftime/;
print strftime('%Y-%m-%d',localtime);

the strftime method does the job effectively for me. Very simple and efficient.

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