Re: Module To Parse Format 'Friday, March 13, 2009 04:20 PM EST'

Roderick A. Anderson wrote:
>Heretic alert.  Date::Manip has ParseDate and UnixDate

As previously discussed, Date::Manip is a pile of steaming manure.
We've run into those two functions making a right pig's ear of timezones:

$ TZ=Australia/Sydney perl -MDate::Manip=UnixDate -lwe 'print UnixDate("2009-01-01T00:00:00", "%Y-%m-%d %T %z %Z")'
2009-01-01 00:00:00 -0500 EST
$

Timezones aside, those functions are attempting to parse date strings
of unknown format, and hence have unpredictable behaviour.  A function
that knows the expected input format will do a much better job.

-zefram