How can I parse relative dates with Perl?

Question

I\'d love to know if there is a module to parse \"human formatted\" dates in Perl. I mean things like \"tomorrow\", \"Tuesday\", \"next week\", \"1 hour ago\".

My re

Answer 1

Date::Manip does exactly this.

Here is an example program:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use Date::Manip;

while ()
{
  chomp;
  print UnixDate($_, "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"),  " ($_)\n";
}

__DATA__
today
yesterday
tomorrow
last Tuesday
next Tuesday
1 hour ago
next week

Which results in the following output:

2008-11-17 15:21:04 (today)
2008-11-16 15:21:04 (yesterday)
2008-11-18 15:21:04 (tomorrow)
2008-11-11 00:00:00 (last Tuesday)
2008-11-18 00:00:00 (next Tuesday)
2008-11-17 14:21:04 (1 hour ago)
2008-11-24 00:00:00 (next week)

UnixDate is one of the functions provided by Date::Manip, the first argument is a date/time in any format that the module supports, the second argument describes how to format the date/time. There are other functions that just parse these "human" dates, without formatting them, to be used in delta calculations, etc.