Re: Question about printing month/day

On Mon, 12 May 2008, Brian Hirt wrote:

> it includes the year (which i do not want).    Does anyone have any advice on 
> how to do this other than manually defining and maintaining 200 different 
> format strings outside of DateTime?    If it is not possible to print a "day 
> month" string, is this something that might be added to the locale objects? 
> It seems like this would be a common thing that's wanted.

This is definitely something that should be part of the DT::Locale api (if 
it exists).

It looks like this data does exist in the CLDR XML data, which is key, 
because the DT::Locale modules are just generated from this data.

If you look at the CLDR data, there's a bit of XML like this:

   <dateTimeFormats>
           <dateTimeFormatLength>
                   <dateTimeFormat>
                           <pattern>{1} {0}</pattern>
                   </dateTimeFormat>
           </dateTimeFormatLength>
           <availableFormats>
                   <dateFormatItem id="HHmm">HH:mm</dateFormatItem>
                   <dateFormatItem id="HHmmss">HH:mm:ss</dateFormatItem>
                   <dateFormatItem id="MMMMd">MMMM d</dateFormatItem>
                   <dateFormatItem id="MMMMdd" draft="unconfirmed">dd MMMM</dateFormatItem>
                   <dateFormatItem id="MMMd" draft="unconfirmed">d-MMM</dateFormatItem>
                   <dateFormatItem id="MMMdd" draft="unconfirmed">dd MMM</dateFormatItem>
                   <dateFormatItem id="MMd" draft="unconfirmed">d/MM</dateFormatItem>
                   <dateFormatItem id="Md">M/d</dateFormatItem>
                   <dateFormatItem id="hhmm" draft="unconfirmed">hh:mm a</dateFormatItem>
                   <dateFormatItem id="hhmmss" draft="unconfirmed">hh:mm:ss a</dateFormatItem>
                   <dateFormatItem id="mmss">mm:ss</dateFormatItem>
                   <dateFormatItem id="yyMM">MM/yy</dateFormatItem>
                   <dateFormatItem id="yyQ">Q yy</dateFormatItem>
                   <dateFormatItem id="yyQQQQ">QQQQ yy</dateFormatItem>
                   <dateFormatItem id="yyyyM" draft="unconfirmed">M/yyyy</dateFormatItem>
                   <dateFormatItem id="yyyyMMM">MMM yyyy</dateFormatItem>
           </availableFormats>
   </dateTimeFormats>

I'm pretty sure this is the type of thing you're looking for.

This is definitely a case of patches welcome.

It probably wouldn't be _too_ hard to add support for this.

The starting point is the tools/generate_from_cldr script, which is what 
generates the various locatel .pm files. It's not the most beautiful code 
though ;)

If you make the generator include this info I would certainly be willing 
to add an appropriate API for retrieving it, probably something like:

   $locale->format_for('MMMMd')

since there's so many formats making a mtehod for each seems like a mess.


-dave

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