Trying to use DateTime. What's wrong?

Question

I am trying to get DateTime to out todays date in %d/%m-%Y\' format, but I get undef.

What am I doing wrong?

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Answer 1

It could be written as simple as:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use DateTime ();

my $now = DateTime->now( 'time_zone' => 'UTC' );
print $now->strftime('%d/%m-%Y');

Answer 2

Generally DateTime formatters will both parse a string to and format a string from a DateTime object. ->parse_datetime will give you a DateTime object from a string, and ->format_datetime will give you a string from a DateTime object. When you have a formatter you want to use to both deserialize and reserialize your dates, you can use it in a few different ways:

use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

use DateTime;
use DateTime::Format::Strptime;

use 5.012;

my $now = DateTime->now(time_zone => 'local');
say $now; ### '2011-07-01T08:22:03' - converted to string with default formatter

my $p = DateTime::Format::Strptime->new(
    pattern     => '%d/%m-%Y',
    time_zone   => 'UTC',
    );
say $p->format_datetime($now); ### use the parser against a DateTime
                               ### '01/07-2011'

$now->set_formatter($p); ### Set the parser as the default string 
                         ### formatter for the DateTime object
say $now; ### '01/07-2011' -- from formatter

### Or set it at object construction
my $now2 = DateTime->now( time_zone => 'local',
                          formatter => $p,
                        );
say $now2; ### '01/07-2011' - from formatter