[Contents]

10. curl::getdate

This function returns the number of seconds since January 1st 1970, for the date and time that the datestring parameter specifies. Read further in the date string parser section below.

If the input string can not be parsed the function return zero.

The following is copied from the original curl_getdate manual page.

PARSING DATES AND TIMES

A "date" is a string, possibly empty, containing many items separated by whitespace. The whitespace may be omitted when no ambiguity arises. The empty string means the beginning of today (i.e., midnight). Order of the items is immaterial. A date string may contain many flavors of items:

• calendar date items This can be specified in a number of different ways. Including 1970-09-17, 70-9-17, 70-09-17, 9/17/72, 24 September 1972, 24 Sept 72, 24 Sep 72, Sep 24, 1972, 24-sep-72, 24sep72. The year can also be omitted, for example: 9/17 or sep 17.

• time of the day items This string specifies the time on a given day. Syntax supported includes: 18:19:0, 18:19, 6:19pm, 18:19-0500 (for specifying the time zone as well).

• time zone items Specifies international time zone. There are a few acronyms supported, but in general you should instead use the specific realtive time compared to UTC. Supported formats include: -1200, MST, +0100.

• day of the week items Specifies a day of the week. If this is mentioned alone it means that day of the week in the future.

  Days of the week may be spelled out in full: Sunday, Monday, etc or they may be abbreviated to their first three letters, optionally followed by a period. The special abbreviations Tues for Tuesday, Wednes for Wednesday and Thur or Thurs for Thursday are also allowed.

  A number may precede a day of the week item to move forward supplementary weeks. It is best used in expression like third monday. In this context, last DAY or next DAY is also acceptable; they move one week before or after the day that DAY by itself would represent.

• relative items A relative item adjusts a date (or the current date if none) forward or backward. Example syntax includes: 1 year, 1 year ago, 2 days, 4 weeks.

  The string tomorrow is worth one day in the future (equivalent to day), the string yesterday is worth one day in the past (equivalent to day ago).

• pure numbers If the decimal number is of the form YYYYMMDD and no other calendar date item appears before it in the date string, then YYYY is read as the year, MM as the month number and DD as the day of the month, for the specified calendar date.

AUTHORS

Originally written by Steven M. Bellovin smb@research.att.com while at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Later tweaked by a couple of people on Usenet. Completely overhauled by Rich $alz rsalz@bbn.com and Jim Berets jberets@bbn.com in August, 1990.