NAME

DateTimeX::Auto - use DateTime without needing to call constructors

SYNOPSIS

use DateTimeX::Auto ':auto';

my $ga_start = '2000-04-06';
$ga_start->add(years => 10);
printf("%s %s\n", $ga_start, ref $ga_start);  # 2010-04-06 DateTime

{
  no DateTimeX::Auto;
  my $string = '2000-04-06';
  printf( "%s\n", ref($string)?'Ref':'NoRef' );  # NoRef
}

DESCRIPTION

DateTime is awesome, but constructing DateTime objects can be annoying. You often need to use one of the formatter modules, or call DateTime->new() with a bunch of values. If you've got a bunch of constant dates in your code, then DateTimeX::Auto makes all this a bit simpler.

It uses overload to overload the q() operator, automatically turning all string constants that match particular regular expressions into DateTime objects. It also overloads stringification to make sure that DateTime objects get stringified back to exactly the format they were given in.

The date formats supported are:

yyyy-mm-dd
yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss

Fractional seconds are also supported, to an arbitrary number of decimal places. However, as DateTime only supports nanosecond precision, any digits after the ninth will be zeroed out.

my $dt         ='1234-12-12T12:34:56.123456789123456789';
print "$dt\n"; # 1234-12-12T12:34:56.123456789000000000

Objects are blessed into the DateTimeX::Auto class which inherits from DateTime. They use UNIVERSAL::ref to masquerade as plain DateTime objects.

print ref('2000-01-01')."\n";   # DateTime

The d and dt Functions

As an alternative DateTimeX::Auto can export a function called d. This might be useful if you'd prefer not to have every string constant in your code turned into a DateTime.

use DateTimeX::Auto 'd';
my $dt = d('2000-01-01');

If d is called with a string that is in an unrecognised format, it croaks. If called with no arguments, returns a DateTime representing the current time.

An alias dt is also available. They're exactly the same.

SEE ALSO

DateTime, DateTimeX::Easy.

AUTHOR

Toby Inkster <tobyink@cpan.org>.

COPYRIGHT

Copyright 2011 Toby Inkster

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.