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 software is copyright (c) 2004 by Casey West.

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