NAME
Date::Tiny - A date object, with as little code as possible
SYNOPSIS
# Create a date manually
$christmas = Date::Tiny->new(
year => 2006,
month => 12,
day => 25,
);
# Show the current date
$today = Date::Tiny->now;
print "Year : " . $today->year . "\n";
print "Month: " . $today->month . "\n";
print "Day : " . $today->day . "\n"; DESCRIPTION
Date::Tiny is a member of the DateTime::Tiny suite of time modules.
It implements an extremely lightweight object that represents a date, 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, Date::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 Date::Tiny module can be inflated into the equivalent DateTime as needing, loading DateTime on the fly if necesary.
For the purposes of date/time logic, all Date::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 local 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.
METHODS
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.
new
my $date = Date::Tiny->new(
year => 2006,
month => 12,
day => 31,
);The new constructor creates a new Date::Tiny object.
It takes three named params. day should be the day of the month (1-31), month should be the month of the year (1-12), year as a 4 digit year.
These are the only params accepted.
Returns a new Date::Tiny object.
now
my $current_date = Date::Tiny->now;The now method creates a new date object for the current date.
The date created will be based on localtime, despite the fact that the date is created in the floating time zone.
Returns a new Date::Tiny object.
year
The year accessor returns the 4-digit year for the date.
month
The month accessor returns the 1-12 month of the year for the date.
day
The day accessor returns the 1-31 day of the month for the date.
ymd
The ymd method returns the most common and accurate stringified date format, which returns in the form "2006-04-12".
as_string
The as_string method converts the date to the default string, which at present is the same as that returned by the ymd method above.
DateTime
The DateTime method is used to inflate the Date::Time object into a full DateTime object.
SUPPORT
Bugs should be reported via the CPAN bug tracker at
http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/ReportBug.html?Queue=Date-Tiny
For other issues, or commercial enhancement or support, contact the author.
AUTHOR
Adam Kennedy <cpan@ali.as>
SEE ALSO
DateTime, DateTime::Tiny, Time::Tiny, Config::Tiny, ali.as
COPYRIGHT
Copyright 2006 Adam Kennedy.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.
The full text of the license can be found in the LICENSE file included with this module.