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Full Discussion: Validating the input date format
Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Validating the input date format Post 302220598 by bakunin on Friday 1st of August 2008 08:41:15 AM
Old 08-01-2008
As zaxxon already implied, you should show some effort to solve the problem yourself. We liek to help, but we dislike doing others works.

Having said this, it can be difficult to plan such a task, so here is, how you should work out your solution:

1) we observe, that a "date" is a structured entity: we expect one or two digits first, than a slash, then a string out of a fixed number of strings (the month), again a slash and then another four-digit number.

2) lets first check the simplest parts: are 2 slashes in the input? are they separating 3 strings? Are all the characters out of the set of characters we expect? (For instance, we expect only digits and the letters contained in month names. If the imput contains an "X" or a "?" we can conclude its illegal without further investigation. If the input looks like "...//..." (no 3 strings) we can conclude the same. All these checks can be done via simple sed scripts.

3) If the input passed this test(s), we can break it up into its parts and analyze them separately: a day number of "32" is certainly wrong, "31" might be right depending on the month and "29" (for February) might be wrong depending on the year.

4) When checking the month part you might want to translate "08" to "Aug" instead of rejecting it, the work is the same and it broadens the "input tolerance" of your script.

I think you got the drift now, so start with zaxxon has given to you (which is an excellent starting point, btw.) and work through these suggestions, then come back when you still need help. We'll be glad to support you with some details.

I hope this helps.

bakunin
 

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LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN

chewmail

CHEWMAIL(1)						User Contributed Perl Documentation					       CHEWMAIL(1)

NAME

       chewmail - mail archiver

SYNOPSIS

       chewmail [OPTIONS] <MAILBOX> ...

DESCRIPTION

       chewmail is a program for archiving mail. It is inspired by the by the Python-based archivemail, but with more useful semantics. All mail
       is archived to the mailbox specified with the --output-box switch, in mbox format. It can read mailboxes in mbox, Maildir and MH formats.

       Internally, chewmail uses Mail::Box, so it support file names and URLs supported by that module.

OPTIONS

       -o mailbox-format, --output-box=mailbox-format
	   The mailbox to archive messages to. The mailbox is run through the Date::Format module, so it supports all it's conversion specifiers.
	   The date and time is relative to the messages timestamp, or the current time if the timestamp is impossible to determine. A sample of
	   the conversion specifiers follows:

	       %%      PERCENT
	       %b      month abbr
	       %B      month
	       %d      numeric day of the month, with leading zeros (eg 01..31)
	       %e      numeric day of the month, without leading zeros (eg 1..31)
	       %D      MM/DD/YY
	       %G      GPS week number (weeks since January 6, 1980)
	       %h      month abbr
	       %H      hour, 24 hour clock, leading 0's)
	       %I      hour, 12 hour clock, leading 0's)
	       %j      day of the year
	       %k      hour
	       %l      hour, 12 hour clock
	       %L      month number, starting with 1
	       %m      month number, starting with 01
	       %n      NEWLINE
	       %o      ornate day of month -- "1st", "2nd", "25th", etc.
	       %t      TAB
	       %U      week number, Sunday as first day of week
	       %w      day of the week, numerically, Sunday == 0
	       %W      week number, Monday as first day of week
	       %x      date format: 11/19/94
	       %y      year (2 digits)
	       %Y      year (4 digits)

       -d days-old, --days=days-old
	   Only archive messages older than than this many days.

       -D date, --date=date
	   Only archive messages old than this date. The date can be any date understood by Perl's Date::Parse module.

       -R, --only-read
	   Only archive messages that are marked seen or read.

       --delete-immediately
	   Synchonize the mailboxes after every message is moved. This will be substantially slower but may provide better recovery for some mail-
	   box formats in the event of a crash.

       --preserve-timestamp
	   Preserve the atime and mtime of the input mailbox. This only affects file-based mailboxes, such as mbox.

       -n, --dry-run
	   Go through all the motions of archiving the mail, but don't actually change any mailboxes.

       -v, --verbose
	   Output more informational messages. Use multiple times for more verbosity.

       -q, --quiet
	   Don't output any messages other than error messages.

       -V, --version
	   Print the version number then exit.

       -h, --help
	   Print usage information then exit.

EXAMPLES

       Archive two day old messages in inbox to inbox-old:

	 chewmail --days 2 -o inbox-old inbox

       Archive read messages to a mailbox named the year-month of the message:

	 chewmail --only-read -o %Y-%m inbox

SEE ALSO

       archivemail(1), Date::Parse, Date::Format, Mail::Box

AUTHOR

       Eric Dorland <eric@kuroneko.ca>

perl v5.8.8							    2006-08-15							       CHEWMAIL(1)
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