How can I convert an ISO8601 timestamp into unix time in Perl?

Question

Given a string that represents a date/time in ISO8601 format (e.g. 20100723T073000), I need to ultimately parse this into a user-supplied format using a general strftime format string. In order to do that, I need to convert the ISO8601 timestamp to a Unix timestamp. There are a huge amount of date/time manipulation modules for Perl and I'm a little overwhelmed. Any suggestions on how to do this?

Answer 1

The champion module for handling dates, times, durations, timezones and formats is DateTime. Once you've got your DateTime object, you can perform a huge number of operations on it, like adding/subtracting other DateTime objects or DateTime::Duration objects, or printing it out in another format.

use strict; use warnings;
use DateTime;
use DateTime::Format::ISO8601;

my $dt = DateTime::Format::ISO8601->parse_datetime('20100723T073000');

print $dt->strftime('%F %T');

prints: "2010-07-23 07:30:00"

Answer 2

If you don't have or don't want to install the DateTime::Format::ISO8601 module, you can parse at least a subset of ISO8601 with HTTP::Date:

$ perl -MHTTP::Date -wle 'print str2time("2013-11-30T23:05:03")'
1385845503

As with any date handling, be cautious about time zone issues.