[perl] Quickly getting to YYYY-mm-dd HH:MM:SS in Perl

When writing Perl scripts I frequently find the need to obtain the current time represented as a string formatted as YYYY-mm-dd HH:MM:SS (say 2009-11-29 14:28:29).

In doing this I find myself taking this quite cumbersome path:

• man perlfunc
• /localtime to search for localtime - repeat five times (/ + \n) to reach the relevant section of the manpage
• Copy the string ($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst) = localtime(time); from the manpage to my script.
• Try with my $now = sprintf("%04d-%02d-%02d %02d:%02d:%02d", $year, $mon, $mday, $hour, $min, $sec);
• Remember gotcha #1: Must add 1900 to $year to get current year.
• Try with my $now = sprintf("%04d-%02d-%02d %02d:%02d:%02d", $year+1900, $mon, $mday, $hour, $min, $sec);
• Remember gotcha #2: Must add 1 to $mon to get current month.
• Try with my $now = sprintf("%04d-%02d-%02d %02d:%02d:%02d", $year+1900, $mon+1, $mday, $hour, $min, $sec);
• Seems ok. Done!

While the process outlined above works it is far from optimal. I'm sure there is a smarter way, so my question is simply:

What is the easiest way to obtain a YYYY-mm-dd HH:MM:SS of the current date/time in Perl?

Where "easy" encompasses both "easy-to-write" and "easy-to-remember".

Why not use the DateTime module to do the dirty work for you? It's easy to write and remember!

use strict;
use warnings;
use DateTime;

my $dt   = DateTime->now;   # Stores current date and time as datetime object
my $date = $dt->ymd;   # Retrieves date as a string in 'yyyy-mm-dd' format
my $time = $dt->hms;   # Retrieves time as a string in 'hh:mm:ss' format

my $wanted = "$date $time";   # creates 'yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss' string
print $wanted;

Once you know what's going on, you can get rid of the temps and save a few lines of code:

use strict;
use warnings;
use DateTime;

my $dt = DateTime->now;
print join ' ', $dt->ymd, $dt->hms;

Short and sweet, no additional modules needed:

my $toDate = `date +%m/%d/%Y" "%l:%M:%S" "%p`;

Output for example would be: 04/25/2017 9:30:33 AM

Time::Piece (in core since Perl 5.10) also has a strftime function and by default overloads localtime and gmtime to return Time::Piece objects:

use Time::Piece;
print localtime->strftime('%Y-%m-%d');

or without the overridden localtime:

use Time::Piece (); 
print Time::Piece::localtime->strftime('%F %T');

Time::Piece::datetime() can eliminate T.

use Time::Piece;
print localtime->datetime(T => q{ });

Try this:

use POSIX qw/strftime/;
print strftime('%Y-%m-%d',localtime);

the strftime method does the job effectively for me. Very simple and efficient.

In many cases, the needed 'current time' is rather $^T, which is the time at which the script started running, in whole seconds (assuming only 60 second minutes) since the UNIX epoch.

This to prevent that an early part of a script uses a different date (or daylight-saving status) than a later part of a script, for example in query-conditions and other derived values.

For that variant of 'current time', one can use a constant, also to document that it was frozen at compile time:

use constant YMD_HMS_AT_START => POSIX::strftime( "%F %T", localtime $^T );

Alternative higher resolution startup time:

0+ [ Time::HiRes::stat("/proc/$$") ]->[10]

I made a little test (Perl v5.20.1 under FreeBSD in VM) calling the following blocks 1.000.000 times each:

A

my ($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst) = localtime(time);
my $now = sprintf("%04d-%02d-%02d %02d:%02d:%02d", $year+1900, $mon+1, $mday, $hour, $min, $sec);

B

my $now = strftime('%Y%m%d%H%M%S',localtime);

C

my $now = Time::Piece::localtime->strftime('%Y%m%d%H%M%S');

with the following results:

A: 2 seconds

B: 11 seconds

C: 19 seconds

This is of course not a thorough test or benchmark, but at least it is reproducable for me, so even though it is more complicated, I'd prefer the first method if generating a datetimestamp is required very often.

Calling (eg. under FreeBSD 10.1)

my $now = `date "+%Y%m%d%H%M%S" | tr -d "\n"`;

might not be such a good idea because it is not OS-independent and takes quite some time.

Best regards, Holger

if you just want a human readable time string and not that exact format:

$t = localtime;
print "$t\n";

prints

Mon Apr 27 10:16:19 2015

or whatever is configured for your locale.