Quickly getting to YYYY-mm-dd HH:MM:SS in Perl

Question

When writing Perl scripts I frequently find the need to obtain the current time represented as a string formatted as YYYY-mm-dd HH:MM:SS (say 2009-11-29 14:28

Answer 1

I made a little test (Perl v5.20.1 under FreeBSD in VM) calling the following blocks 1.000.000 times each:

A

my ($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst) = localtime(time);
my $now = sprintf("%04d-%02d-%02d %02d:%02d:%02d", $year+1900, $mon+1, $mday, $hour, $min, $sec);

B

my $now = strftime('%Y%m%d%H%M%S',localtime);

C

my $now = Time::Piece::localtime->strftime('%Y%m%d%H%M%S');

with the following results:

A: 2 seconds

B: 11 seconds

C: 19 seconds

This is of course not a thorough test or benchmark, but at least it is reproducable for me, so even though it is more complicated, I'd prefer the first method if generating a datetimestamp is required very often.

Calling (eg. under FreeBSD 10.1)

my $now = `date "+%Y%m%d%H%M%S" | tr -d "\n"`;

might not be such a good idea because it is not OS-independent and takes quite some time.

Best regards, Holger