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This is a set of routines designed to make any common
date/time manipulation easy to do. Operations such as
comparing two times, calculating a time a given amount of
time from another, or parsing international times are all
easily done.
Date::Manip deals only with the Gregorian calendar (the
one currently in use). The Julian calendar defined leap
years as every 4th year. The Gregorian calendar improved
this by making every 100th year NOT a leap year, unless it
was also the 400th year. The Gregorian calendar has been
extrapolated back to the year 1000 AD and forward to the
year 9999 AD. Note that in historical context, the Julian
calendar was in use until 1582 when the Gregorian calendar
was adopted by the Catholic church. Protestant countries
did not accept it until later; Germany and Netherlands in
1698, British Empire in 1752, Russia in 1918. Note that
the Gregorian calendar is itself imperfect. Each year is
on average 26 seconds too long, which means that every
3,323 years, a day should be removed from the calendar.
No attempt is made to correct for that.
Date::Manip is therefore not equipped to truly deal with
historacle dates, but should be able to perform
(virtually) any operation dealing with a modern time and
date.
Among other things, Date::Manip allow you to:
1. Enter a date and be able to choose any format
conveniant
2. Compare two dates, entered in widely different formats
to determine which is earlier
3. Extract any information you want from ANY date using a
format string similar to the Unix date command
4. Determine the amount of time between two dates
5. Add a time offset to a date to get a second date (i.e.
determine the date 132 days ago or 2 years and 3 months
after Jan 2, 1992)
6. Work with dates with dates using international formats
(foreign month names, 12-10-95 referring to October rather than
December, etc.).
Each of these tasks is trivial (one or two lines at most)
with this package.
Although the word date is used extensively here, it is
actually somewhat misleading. Date::Manip works with the
full date AND time (year, month, day, hour, minute,
second).
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