perl date time

Perl has a built-in module called DateTime that provides a comprehensive set of tools for working with dates and times. Here is an example of how to use the DateTime module to get the current date and time:

use DateTime;

my $now = DateTime->now;
print "Current date and time: ", $now->datetime, "\n";

In this example, we first load the DateTime module using the use statement. We then create a new DateTime object called $now using the now method, which returns the current date and time.

The DateTime object has a number of methods that allow you to manipulate and format dates and times in various ways. For example, you can use the year, month, day, hour, minute, and second methods to get the individual components of a date and time, like this:

my $year = $now->year;
my $month = $now->month;
my $day = $now->day;
my $hour = $now->hour;
my $minute = $now->minute;
my $second = $now->second;

You can also use the strftime method to format a DateTime object as a string, using a format string that specifies the desired output format. Here is an example that formats the current date and time as a string in ISO 8601 format:

my $iso8601 = $now->strftime('%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S');
print "Current date and time (ISO 8601): ", $iso8601, "\n";

In this example, the %Y, %m, %d, %H, %M, and %S format codes represent the year, month, day, hour, minute, and second components of the date and time, respectively. The T character is a literal character that separates the date and time components, and the colons (:) are also literal characters that separate the hour, minute, and second components of the time. The resulting string looks like this:

Current date and time (ISO 8601): 2023-03-01T14:30:00

The DateTime module provides many more features for working with dates and times, such as time zone handling, date arithmetic, and parsing dates from strings. You can consult the official documentation for more information: https://metacpan.org/pod/DateTime