NAME
Time::Tiny - A time object, with as little code as possible
VERSION
version 1.08
SYNOPSIS
# Create a time manually
$christmas = Time::Tiny->new(
hour => 10,
minute => 45,
second => 0,
);
# Show the current time
$now = Time::Tiny->now;
print "Hour : " . $now->hour . "\n";
print "Minute : " . $now->minute . "\n";
print "Second : " . $now->second . "\n";DESCRIPTION
Time::Tiny is a member of the DateTime::Tiny suite of time modules.
It implements an extremely lightweight object that represents a time, without any time data.
The Tiny Mandate
Many CPAN modules which provide the best implementation of a concept can be very large. For some reason, this generally seems to be about 3 megabyte of ram usage to load the module.
For a lot of the situations in which these large and comprehensive implementations exist, some people will only need a small fraction of the functionality, or only need this functionality in an ancillary role.
The aim of the Tiny modules is to implement an alternative to the large module that implements a subset of the functionality, using as little code as possible.
Typically, this means a module that implements between 50% and 80% of the features of the larger module, but using only 100 kilobytes of code, which is about 1/30th of the larger module.
The Concept of Tiny Date and Time
Due to the inherent complexity, Date and Time is intrinsically very difficult to implement properly.
The arguably only module to implement it completely correct is DateTime. However, to implement it properly DateTime is quite slow and requires 3-4 megabytes of memory to load.
The challenge in implementing a Tiny equivalent to DateTime is to do so without making the functionality critically flawed, and to carefully select the subset of functionality to implement.
If you look at where the main complexity and cost exists, you will find that it is relatively cheap to represent a date or time as an object, but much much more expensive to modify or convert the object.
As a result, Time::Tiny provides the functionality required to represent a date as an object, to stringify the date and to parse it back in, but does not allow you to modify the dates.
The purpose of this is to allow for date object representations in situations like log parsing and fast real-time work.
The problem with this is that having no ability to modify date limits the usefulness greatly.
To make up for this, if you have DateTime installed, any Time::Tiny module can be inflated into the equivalent DateTime as needed, loading DateTime on the fly if necessary.
For the purposes of date/time logic, all Time::Tiny objects exist in the "C" locale, and the "floating" time zone (although obviously in a pure date context, the time zone largely doesn't matter).
When converting up to full DateTime objects, these locale and time zone settings will be applied (although an ability is provided to override this).
In addition, the implementation is strictly correct and is intended to be very easily to sub-class for specific purposes of your own.
USAGE
In general, the intent is that the API be as close as possible to the API for DateTime. Except, of course, that this module implements less of it.
METHODS
new
# Create a Time::Tiny object for midnight
my $midnight = Time::Tiny->new(
hour => 0,
minute => 0,
second => 0,
);The new constructor creates a new Time::Tiny object.
It takes three named parameters. hour should be the hour of the day (0-23), minute should be the minute of the hour (0-59), and second should be the second of the minute (0-59).
These are the only parameters accepted.
Returns a new Time::Tiny object.
now
my $current_time = Time::Tiny->now;The now method creates a new date object for the current time.
The time created will be based on localtime, despite the fact that the time is created in the floating time zone.
This means that the time created by now is somewhat lossy, but since the primary purpose of Time::Tiny is for small transient time objects, and not for use in calculations and comparisons, this is considered acceptable for now.
Returns a new Time::Tiny object.
hour
The hour accessor returns the hour component of the time as an integer from zero to twenty-three (0-23) in line with 24-hour time.
minute
The minute accessor returns the minute component of the time as an integer from zero to fifty-nine (0-59).
second
The second accessor returns the second component of the time as an integer from zero to fifty-nine (0-59).
from_string
The from_string method creates a new Time::Tiny object from a string.
The string is expected to be an "hh:mm:ss" type ISO 8601 time string.
my $almost_midnight = Time::Tiny->from_string( '23:59:59' );Returns a new Time::Tiny object, or throws an exception on error.
as_string
The as_string method converts the time object to an ISO 8601 time string, with separators (see example in from_string).
Returns a string.
DateTime
The DateTime method is used to create a DateTime object that is equivalent to the Time::Tiny object, for use in conversions and calculations.
As mentioned earlier, the object will be set to the 'C' locate, and the 'floating' time zone.
If installed, the DateTime module will be loaded automatically.
Returns a DateTime object, or throws an exception if DateTime is not installed on the current host.
HISTORY
This module was written by Adam Kennedy in 2006. In 2016, David Golden adopted it as a caretaker maintainer.
SEE ALSO
DateTime, DateTime::Tiny, Time::Tiny, Config::Tiny, ali.as
SUPPORT
Bugs / Feature Requests
Please report any bugs or feature requests through the issue tracker at https://github.com/dagolden/Time-Tiny/issues. You will be notified automatically of any progress on your issue.
Source Code
This is open source software. The code repository is available for public review and contribution under the terms of the license.
https://github.com/dagolden/Time-Tiny
git clone https://github.com/dagolden/Time-Tiny.gitAUTHORS
Adam Kennedy <adamk@cpan.org>
David Golden <dagolden@cpan.org>
CONTRIBUTOR
Tim Heaney <oylenshpeegul@gmail.com>
COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
This software is copyright (c) 2006 by Adam Kennedy.
This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.