How can I get this week's dates in Perl?
- by ABach
I have the following loop to calculate the dates of the current week and print them out. It works, but I am swimming in the amount of date/time possibilities in Perl and want to get your opinion on whether there is a better way. Here's the code I've written:
#!/usr/bin/env perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use DateTime;
# Calculate numeric value of today and the
# target day (Monday = 1, Sunday = 7); the
# target, in this case, is Monday, since that's
# when I want the week to start
my $today_dt = DateTime->now;
my $today = $today_dt->day_of_week;
my $target = 1;
# Create DateTime copies to act as the "bookends"
# for the date range
my ($start, $end) = ($today_dt->clone(), $today_dt->clone());
if ($today == $target)
{
# If today is the target, "start" is already set;
# we simply need to set the end date
$end->add( days => 6 );
}
else
{
# Otherwise, we calculate the Monday preceeding today
# and the Sunday following today
my $delta = ($target - $today + 7) % 7;
$start->add( days => $delta - 7 );
$end->add( days => $delta - 1 );
}
# I clone the DateTime object again because, for some reason,
# I'm wary of using $start directly...
my $cur_date = $start->clone();
while ($cur_date <= $end)
{
my $date_ymd = $cur_date->ymd;
print "$date_ymd\n";
$cur_date->add( days => 1 );
}
As mentioned, this works, but is it the quickest or most efficient? I'm guessing that quickness and efficiency may not necessarily go together, but your feedback is very appreciated.
