Question

I am writing a small plugin and I need to tell the time lapsed since a certain date, which is passed to the plugin in the format: 13 Oct 2005.

Are there are TWiki core functions to:

• parse the date (the format is flexible),
• compute the number of days till "today"?

Or any other suggestions for me to proceed?

Thanks.

Environment

-- PankajPant - 24 Jan 2006

Answer

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In addition to the various PERL functions available from CPAN and used in a variety of plugins that handle date parsting, there is also a TimeSincePlugin. I'm using it in Dakar, I'm not sure how it fucntions in Cairo.

-- AntonAylward - 25 Jan 2006

Thanks for the tip. Date::Calc seems to have all that I need and much more.

-- PankajPant - 25 Jan 2006

You don't need to write a plugin or make use of Perl at all. The SpreadSheetPlugin has

• FORMATTIME( serial, text ) -- convert a serialized date into a date string
• FORMATGMTIME( serial, text ) -- convert a serialized date into a GMT date string
• TIME( text ) -- convert a date string into a serialized date number
• TIMEADD( serial, value, unit ) -- add a value to a serialized date
• TIMEDIFF( serial_1, serial_2, unit ) -- time difference between two serialized dates
• TODAY( ) -- serialized date of today at midnight GMT

Why make work for yourself?

-- AntonAylward - 25 Jan 2006