Time::Local(3) User Contributed Perl Documentation Time::Local(3)
NAME
Time::Local - Efficiently compute time from local and GMT time
VERSION
version 1.28
SYNOPSIS
use Time::Local;
my $time = timelocal( $sec, $min, $hour, $mday, $mon, $year );
my $time = timegm( $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_modern()" and "timegm_modern()"
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()" subs do not do this year munging and simply take
the year value as provided.
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 subs and use them instead of the default "timelocal()" and
"timegm()".
You are strongly encouraged to use these subs in any new code which
uses this module. It will almost certainly make your code's behavior
less surprising.
"timelocal()" and "timegm()"
This module exports two functions by default, "timelocal()" and
"timegm()".
The "timelocal()" and "timegm()" functions perform range checking on
the input $sec, $min, $hour, $mday, and $mon values by default.
"timelocal_nocheck()" and "timegm_nocheck()"
If you are working with data you know to be valid, you can speed your
code up by using the "nocheck" variants, "timelocal_nocheck()" and
"timegm_nocheck()". These variants must be explicitly imported.
use Time::Local 'timelocal_nocheck';
# The 365th day of 1999
print scalar localtime timelocal_nocheck( 0, 0, 0, 365, 0, 99 );
If you supply data which is not valid (month 27, second 1,000) the
results will be unpredictable (so don't do that).
Year Value Interpretation
This does not apply to "timelocal_modern" or "timegm_modern". 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.
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 should
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 AT perl.org>.
I am also usually active on IRC as 'autarch' on "irc://irc.perl.org".
SOURCE
The source code repository for Time-Local can be found at
<https://github.com/houseabsolute/Time-Local>;.
AUTHOR
Dave Rolsky <autarch AT urth.org>
CONTRIBUTORS
o Florian Ragwitz <rafl AT debian.org>
o J. Nick Koston <nick AT cpanel.net>
o Unknown <unknown AT example.com>
COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
This software is copyright (c) 1997 - 2018 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 v5.26.3 2018-06-13 Time::Local(3)
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