I wonder if you'd care to suggest how we could improve the documentation for localtime to make it more obvious how to solve your problem. Currently the docs say this:

... $mday is the day of the month, and $mon is the month itself, in the range 0..11 with 0 indicating January and 11 indicating December.

If you're formatting dates for outputting to the user, let me recommend a proper date formatting tool, like POSIX::strftime or DateTime or Date::Calc.

If all you need is the number of the month, how about just adding 1 to the number?

Change it from...

$mon is the month itself, in the range 0..11 with 0 indicating January and 11 indicating December.

...to...

$mon is the month offset, in the range 0..11 with 0 indicating January and 11 indicating December.

...as the former implies that $mon is the number of the month which people might assume starts at 1 (and stop reading). But my guess is that anyone who has a problem hasn't read the current docs. (but, hey at least they don't just assume tm_year is the last two digits nowadays).

--
James Antill

@month = qw(january february march april may june july august septembe
+r october november december);
$m = 1;
print $month[$m];  # prints "february"
[download]

(No, I lied, actually the primary reason is backward compatibility with C. But I digress.)

So perhaps you can do this?

$m = 1;
print +(1 .. 12)[$m];     # prints "2"
[download]

Now, it might be easier still, to just increment the month number.

$m++;
[download]

Enjoy,
Mickey

No, scalar(@fingers)==10; but the first one is called 0

_{fraktalisman keeps rolling}

if(! $careless_with_power_tools)
{
scalar(@fingers) == 10;
}
else
{
scalar(@fingers) < 10;
}
[download]

emc

" When in doubt, use brute force." — Ken Thompson

and we can count up to 1024 with them :)

If you're doing a lot of work with dates you might want to have a look at the module Date::Manip, which is very handy and lets you avoid messing with localtime.

Steve

Avoiding confusion between mildly silly little-endian dates and utterly ridiculous middle-endian dates is easy. Use the ISO 8601 standard - YYYY-MM-DD.

Add 1 to the number returned for month. If you notice, the year is also "wrong". You'd need to add 1900 to it, to get the current year. I'm not sure whether this is a "feature" or a bug, but it's what we've got - so we have to deal with it.

When you run into problems, the first thing to do is to review the documentation about the function, module, operator, etc. that you're trying to use. Usually this will explain the quirks and idiosyncrasies that appear. A good place to start is by typing 'perldoc perldoc' from the command line. Another place is right here on PM, using the Search or Super Search features.

PM has a whole bunch of helpful, cheerful monks who will try to help you - but there are occasional monks who are impatient with people who appear unwilling to make an effort first. It's better to try to find the answer yourself, then ask - and tell people what you've tried so far.