You are viewing the version of this documentation from Perl 5.24.0. View the latest version
localtime EXPR
localtime

Converts a time as returned by the time function to a 9-element list with the time analyzed for the local time zone. Typically used as follows:

#     0    1    2     3     4    5     6     7     8
my ($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst) =
                                            localtime(time);

All list elements are numeric and come straight out of the C `struct tm'. $sec, $min, and $hour are the seconds, minutes, and hours of the specified time.

$mday is the day of the month and $mon the month in the range 0..11, with 0 indicating January and 11 indicating December. This makes it easy to get a month name from a list:

my @abbr = qw(Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec);
print "$abbr[$mon] $mday";
# $mon=9, $mday=18 gives "Oct 18"

$year contains the number of years since 1900. To get a 4-digit year write:

$year += 1900;

To get the last two digits of the year (e.g., "01" in 2001) do:

$year = sprintf("%02d", $year % 100);

$wday is the day of the week, with 0 indicating Sunday and 3 indicating Wednesday. $yday is the day of the year, in the range 0..364 (or 0..365 in leap years.)

$isdst is true if the specified time occurs during Daylight Saving Time, false otherwise.

If EXPR is omitted, localtime uses the current time (as returned by time).

In scalar context, localtime returns the ctime(3) value:

my $now_string = localtime;  # e.g., "Thu Oct 13 04:54:34 1994"

The format of this scalar value is not locale-dependent but built into Perl. For GMT instead of local time use the gmtime builtin. See also the Time::Local module (for converting seconds, minutes, hours, and such back to the integer value returned by time), and the POSIX module's strftime and mktime functions.

To get somewhat similar but locale-dependent date strings, set up your locale environment variables appropriately (please see perllocale) and try for example:

use POSIX qw(strftime);
my $now_string = strftime "%a %b %e %H:%M:%S %Y", localtime;
# or for GMT formatted appropriately for your locale:
my $now_string = strftime "%a %b %e %H:%M:%S %Y", gmtime;

Note that %a and %b, the short forms of the day of the week and the month of the year, may not necessarily be three characters wide.

The Time::gmtime and Time::localtime modules provide a convenient, by-name access mechanism to the gmtime and localtime functions, respectively.

For a comprehensive date and time representation look at the DateTime module on CPAN.

Portability issues: "localtime" in perlport.