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Homework and Emergencies Emergency UNIX and Linux Support Question on time and date formating.. Post 302772168 by jim mcnamara on Saturday 23rd of February 2013 08:15:27 PM
Old 02-23-2013
Freeform dates are a disaster in data processing. This problem is a good example.

given this sample:
Code:
  
  25/1/1979 06:00:00 AM
  7/19/1979 06:00:00 PM

So dd/mm and mm/dd are both possible.

This date now becomes undecidable:

Code:
4/7/1979 06:00:00 PM

It is either April 7 or July 4.

So unless there is a way to remove undecidable dates, you cannot reliably process your data. So, this whole problem cannot be decided as stated. Which is why the answers you have gotten are not much help. My specialty is calendrics - and I do not know of a solution. It requires intelligent human intervention to look at other data that is related to the problem dates lines of data and hopefully figure it out.

Code:
1. do not let that happen again in the future, constrain date entry to a known format.
2. find somebody in your company who knows a lot about the data, let them decide.
Or guess.

 

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Date::Format(3) 					User Contributed Perl Documentation					   Date::Format(3)

NAME
Date::Format - Date formating subroutines SYNOPSIS
use Date::Format; @lt = localtime(time); print time2str($template, time); print strftime($template, @lt); print time2str($template, time, $zone); print strftime($template, @lt, $zone); print ctime(time); print asctime(@lt); print ctime(time, $zone); print asctime(@lt, $zone); DESCRIPTION
This module provides routines to format dates into ASCII strings. They correspond to the C library routines "strftime" and "ctime". time2str(TEMPLATE, TIME [, ZONE]) "time2str" converts "TIME" into an ASCII string using the conversion specification given in "TEMPLATE". "ZONE" if given specifies the zone which the output is required to be in, "ZONE" defaults to your current zone. strftime(TEMPLATE, TIME [, ZONE]) "strftime" is similar to "time2str" with the exception that the time is passed as an array, such as the array returned by "localtime". ctime(TIME [, ZONE]) "ctime" calls "time2str" with the given arguments using the conversion specification "%a %b %e %T %Y " asctime(TIME [, ZONE]) "asctime" calls "time2str" with the given arguments using the conversion specification "%a %b %e %T %Y " MULTI-LANGUAGE SUPPORT Date::Format is capable of formating into several languages by creating a language specific object and calling methods, see Date::Language my $lang = Date::Language->new('German'); $lang->time2str("%a %b %e %T %Y ", time); I am open to suggestions on this. CONVERSION SPECIFICATION
Each conversion specification is replaced by appropriate characters as described in the following list. The appropriate characters are determined by the LC_TIME category of the program's locale. %% PERCENT %a day of the week abbr %A day of the week %b month abbr %B month %c MM/DD/YY HH:MM:SS %C ctime format: Sat Nov 19 21:05:57 1994 %d numeric day of the month, with leading zeros (eg 01..31) %e like %d, but a leading zero is replaced by a space (eg 1..32) %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 %M minute, leading 0's %n NEWLINE %o ornate day of month -- "1st", "2nd", "25th", etc. %p AM or PM %P am or pm (Yes %p and %P are backwards :) %q Quarter number, starting with 1 %r time format: 09:05:57 PM %R time format: 21:05 %s seconds since the Epoch, UCT %S seconds, leading 0's %t TAB %T time format: 21:05:57 %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 %X time format: 21:05:57 %y year (2 digits) %Y year (4 digits) %Z timezone in ascii. eg: PST %z timezone in format -/+0000 %d, %e, %H, %I, %j, %k, %l, %m, %M, %q, %y and %Y can be output in Roman numerals by prefixing the letter with "O", e.g. %OY will output the year as roman numerals. LIMITATION
The functions in this module are limited to the time range that can be represented by the time_t data type, i.e. 1901-12-13 20:45:53 GMT to 2038-01-19 03:14:07 GMT. AUTHOR
Graham Barr <gbarr@pobox.com> COPYRIGHT
Copyright (c) 1995-2009 Graham Barr. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. perl v5.18.2 2009-12-12 Date::Format(3)
All times are GMT -4. The time now is 01:04 AM.
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