this seems to do what you wanted?

     my $dt1 = DateTime->new(
         year   => 2008,
         month  => 10,
         day    => 2,
     );

     my $dt2 = DateTime->new(
         year   => 2008,
         month  => 10,
         day    => 5,
     );

     my $diff = $dt2 - $dt1;
     print $diff->delta_days, "\n";

--d

Kristian Flint wrote:
> Hi everybody!
> 
> You may remember me from a while back wanting to make a module
> pertaining to UK bank holidays. I got a bit stuck on some other work and
> have finally had some time to come back to it. I'm pleased to say that
> it's going very well but I've hit a small snag, which I could fix with a
> hack but part of doing all this is wanting to contribute back to the
> community so I'd rather try and work out why something isn't working...
> 
> So here's the problem, I've got two DateTime objects and I want to work
> out how many days there are between them. Simple I thought:
> 
>     my $dt1 = DateTime->new( 
>         year   => 2008,
>         month  => 10,
>         day    => 2,
>     );
>     
>     my $dt2 = DateTime->new( 
>         year   => 2008,
>         month  => 10,
>         day    => 5,
>     );
> 
> my $span = DateTime::Span->from_datetimes( start => $dt1, end => $dt2 );
> my $d      = $span->duration;
> print $d->days;
> 
> That didn't work so I went back to the documentation and spotted that
> "The last example demonstrates that there will not be any conversion
> between units which don't have a fixed conversion rate."
> Which if someone could clarify would be great because the
> $span->duration seems to return a duration object in seconds, there's
> definitely a fixed number of seconds in a day (actually unless we're
> talking about that tiny fraction that ends up counting towards a quarter
> of a day per year?).
> 
> Anyways, I thought fair enough, I read on and got to:
> "If you need more flexibility in presenting information about durations,
> please take a look a DateTime::Format::Duration."
> Great, nearly there.
> Except this doesn't seem to be working : (
> 
> 
> Can somebody just check I'm not mental:
> 
> FROM DOCS:
> http://search.cpan.org/~rickm/DateTime-Format-Duration-1.03a/lib/DateTim
> e/Format/Duration.pm
> 
>  $d = DateTime::Format::Duration->new(
>                 pattern => '%Y years, %m months, %e days, '.
>                                 '%H hours, %M minutes, %S seconds'
>         );
> 
>         print $d->format_duration(
>                 DateTime::Duration->new(
>                         years   => 3,
>                         months  => 5,
>                         days    => 1,
>                         hours   => 6,
>                         minutes => 15,
>                         seconds => 45,
>                         nanoseconds => 12000
>                 )
>         );
>         # 3 years, 5 months, 1 days, 6 hours, 15 minutes, 45 seconds
> END FROM DOCS
> 
> This doesn't actually return what's stated above (#) but actually
> returns
> 0 years, 41 months, 1 days, 00 hours, 375 minutes, 45 seconds
> And if I try and make the pattern => '%e' to just get the number of
> days, this returns 0!
> 
> 
> Have I missed something?! I'm thinking there's probably a _much_ easier
> way of getting what I want and it's just passed by my small boy brain.
> 
> Appreciative of any help,
> 
> Kristian
> 
>