Beefy Boxes and Bandwidth Generously Provided by pair Networks
The stupid question is the question not asked
 
PerlMonks  

How to find yesterdays date (was: Date)

by Anonymous Monk
on Mar 11, 2001 at 23:44 UTC ( [id://63647]=perlquestion: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi perl guru's,
i want to access a flat file which is named $day-$month-$year.txt but for the previous day...how can i do this ?

So for example i would like to be abled to access a file for yesterday..any ideas how i can do this ?

2001-03-11 Edit by Corion : Changed title

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Date
by redcloud (Parson) on Mar 12, 2001 at 00:14 UTC
    Okay, without using modules:
    my ($day, $month, $year, $filename); (undef, undef, undef, $day, $month, $year, undef) = localtime(time() - + (24*60*60)); $filename = sprintf("%02d-%02d-%04d.txt", $day, $month+1, $year+1900);
    Season to taste.

    And, yes, you really should learn to use modules. They're invaluable.

      With the tiny caveat that this'll fail during one hour a year if you're honoring daylight savings time. If you think about this a minute or two, there's an easy workaround (which I'll leave as an exercise :)

      Retracted. See below.

        Wouldn't it fail two hours each year? If it is within the first hour of the day after a 23 hour day, 24 hours ago will be two days ago. If it is within the last hour of a 25 hour day, 24 hours ago will be the same day.
Re: Date
by Masem (Monsignor) on Mar 11, 2001 at 23:53 UTC
    Take a look at the CPAN Module Date::Calc -- it can do 'delta' calculations for standard dates.
    Dr. Michael K. Neylon - mneylon-pm@masemware.com || "You've left the lens cap of your mind on again, Pinky" - The Brain
Re: How to find yesterdays date (was: Date)
by merlyn (Sage) on Mar 12, 2001 at 15:09 UTC
    There's always the old standby (joke) answer:
    my $yesterdays_date = localtime; sleep 86400; print "Yesterday, it was $yesterdays_date\n";
    And of course, this code breaks near the DST boundaries.

    -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

      If you're going to dust this one off, you could also mention the standard optimisation:
      my $yesterdays_date = localtime; sleep 86400; print "Yesterday, it was $yesterdays_date\n"; sleep -86400;
      Yes, yes, I know it's sad...

      Update: Can't claim credit... I believe that belong to Ilya Zakharevich, otherwise it would have been even sadder, and I wouldn't've dared post.

Re: How to find yesterdays date (was: Date)
by dneedles (Sexton) on Mar 12, 2001 at 10:00 UTC
    Hello, One last tidbit. I'm not sure of your exact situation but your question hit on an 'admin' issue. One idea to ease administration would be to reverse the file schema to Year-Month-Day. That way when you sort it it will be chronological (if you use 1999,2000, and numerics for month). Just a thought 8~)
      Agreed. Also if you have any employees like me who come from outside of the US (Canada in my case) there is an excellent chance that they will be confused by dd-mm-yyyy formats. I grew up with mm-dd-yyyy and it can be very confusing. But nobody is particularly confused by yyyy-mm-dd.

        Okay, why are so many Americans writing dates as m-d-yy and mm-dd-yy?? Am I supposed to be able to figure out what 02-03-01 is supposed to mean??

        /me runs screaming down the hall, hands waving in the air, bangs into the wall at the end, and collapses in a heap.

                - tye (but my friends call me an ambulance)
Re: Date
by CiceroLove (Monk) on Mar 12, 2001 at 00:01 UTC
    You really should learn how to use modules. They will save you countless hours contemplating suicide.
    Having said that, you need to look at using
    $date = scalar localtime(time);

    See what this prints out for you and then go from there. You will have to do things like splitting but without modules, I can't think of another way off the top of my head.

    CiceroLove
    Fates! We will know your pleasures: That we shall die, we know; 'Tis but the time, and drawing days out, that men stand upon. - Act III,I, Julius Caesar
Re: Date
by JP Sama (Hermit) on Mar 11, 2001 at 23:59 UTC
    "today - 1" *g*
    the little effort of "reading about it", and you probably have the program already done!
    Good luck anyway!
    #!/jpsama/bin/perl -w
    $tks = `mount`;
    $jpsama = $! if $!;
    print $jpsama;
    
Re: How to find yesterdays date (was: Date)
by DeaconBlues (Monk) on Mar 12, 2001 at 08:59 UTC

    Here you go. Sometimes you just have to give them what they want.

    my $SECS_IN_A_DAY = 86400; # 60 secs * 60 mins * 24 hrs my ($day, $month, $year) = (localtime(time-$SECS_IN_A_DAY))[3..5]; $month++; $year += 1900; # $month = "0".$month if (length($month) == 1); # for dd-mm-yyyy.txt f +iles. # $day = "0".$day if (length($day) == 1); # for dd-mm-yyyy.txt files. print "File is $day-$month-$year.txt\n";
      As mentioned over in the Dates thread, this will give you the wrong answer at least one hour a year if you're living in a timezone that switches to and from daylight savings time.

      Update: After some research into this (and an experiment with Time::Local), I'm retracting my claim above, at least for the U.S. We do the timezone switch by either repeating 1am on the first Sunday of April, or by dropping 2am on the last Sunday of October. In either case, determining yesterday's date (but not time) can be done safely by subtracting 24 hours from the current time.

      Subtracing 24 hours will indeed give the wrong answer during a 1 hour window each year in the U.S. if you're in an area that's doing a daylight savings switch.

      Sat Mar 31 22:00:00 2001 < Sun Apr 1 23:00:00 Sat Mar 31 23:00:00 2001 < Mon Apr 2 00:00:00 * Sun Apr 1 00:00:00 2001 < Mon Apr 2 01:00:00
Re: Date
by Anonymous Monk on Mar 12, 2001 at 02:01 UTC
    Thanks redcloud, thats great...

    The month is printing out as 03 is there a way to change it to 3 ? Thanks.
      Yes, if you want to remove the leading zero, you can change the %02d in the sprintf command to %d. You probably need to look at whether you'll have to do this for the day, too. (And the %04d for the year was just overkill on my part, unless you've got files over 1001 years old. 8^P )
Re: How to find yesterdays date (was: Date)
by Beatnik (Parson) on Mar 12, 2001 at 13:24 UTC
    Isn't this one of those classic questions, where one of those classic answers might be :

    scalar(localtime(time-86400))

    Altho I'm pretty sure there are many other "classic answers" those this one.

    Greetz
    Beatnik
    ... Quidquid perl dictum sit, altum viditur.
Re: Date
by Anonymous Monk on Mar 11, 2001 at 23:55 UTC
    I dont really know how to use modules, is there another way to do this in code ?

      modules are easier to use than writing your own code, just take a look at the heads in the module to get a grip of how to use it, and use the perldoc and eventually you will learn to use them always and whenever you get the chance, that is if you really enjoy programming and want to continue your way through Perl.


      Chady | http://chady.net/

Log In?
Username:
Password:

What's my password?
Create A New User
Domain Nodelet?
Node Status?
node history
Node Type: perlquestion [id://63647]
Approved by root
help
Chatterbox?
and the web crawler heard nothing...

How do I use this?Last hourOther CB clients
Other Users?
Others rifling through the Monastery: (3)
As of 2024-03-29 06:58 GMT
Sections?
Information?
Find Nodes?
Leftovers?
    Voting Booth?

    No recent polls found