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Does Perl have a year 2000 problem?

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Does Perl have a year 2000 problem?

Not unless you use Perl to create one. The date and time functions supplied with perl (gmtime and localtime) supply adequate information to determine the year well beyond 2000 (2038 is when trouble strikes). The year returned by these functions when used in an array context is the year minus 1900. For years between 1910 and 1999 this happens to be a 2-digit decimal number. To avoid the year 2000 problem simply do not treat the year as a 2-digit number. It isn't.

When gmtime() and localtime() are used in a scalar context they return a timestamp string that contains a fully-expanded year. For example, $timestamp = gmtime(1005613200) sets $timestamp to ``Tue Nov 13 01:00:00 2001''. There's no year 2000 problem here.

Source: Perl FAQ: Data Manipulation
Copyright: Copyright (c) 1997 Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington.

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