NAME

Email::Date - Find and Format Date Headers

VERSION

version 1.104

SYNOPSIS

  use Email::Date;
  
  my $email = join '', <>;
  my $date  = find_date($email);
  print $date->ymd;
  
  my $header = format_date($date->epoch);
  
  Email::Simple->create(
      header => [
          Date => $header,
      ],
      body => '...',
  );

DESCRIPTION

Achtung! Probably you'll be find just using Email::Date::Format to produce dates or Date::Parse to parse dates. This module isn't much needed anymore, but does provide "find_date", described below.

RFC 2822 defines the "Date:" header. It declares the header a required part of an email message. The syntax for date headers is clearly laid out. Stil, even a perfectly planned world has storms. The truth is, many programs get it wrong. Very wrong. Or, they don't include a "Date:" header at all. This often forces you to look elsewhere for the date, and hoping to find something.

For this reason, the tedious process of looking for a valid date has been encapsulated in this software. Further, the process of creating RFC compliant date strings is also found in this software.

FUNCTIONS

find_date

  my $time_piece = find_date $email;

"find_date" accepts an email message in any format Email::Abstract can understand. It looks through the email message and finds a date, converting it to a Time::Piece object.

If it can't find a date, it returns false.

"find_date" is exported by default.

format_date

  my $date = format_date; # now
  my $date = format_date( time - 60*60 ); # one hour ago

"format_date" accepts an epoch value, such as the one returned by "time". It returns a string representing the date and time of the input, as specified in RFC 2822. If no input value is provided, the current value of "time" is used.

"format_date" is exported by default.

format_gmdate

  my $date = format_gmdate;

"format_gmdate" is identical to "format_date", but it will return a string indicating the time in Greenwich Mean Time, rather than local time.

"format_gmdate" is exported on demand, but not by default.

AUTHORS

Casey West
Ricardo SIGNES <rjbs@cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.