Datizo - Library for Dates, Times and Timezones

This is an attempt to isolate the datetime functionality from PostgreSQL and make it available to other systems and languages too.

So far the strategy has been to automate this as much as possible to be able to easily sync with upstream (see upstream/source-update.pl).

State

EXPERIMENTAL: Initial functionality is working, but some parts are still missing. Namely the formating functions and additional timezones need to be loaded.

Future

In the long run maybe this could lead to a joint effort of multiple projects.

Todo

• change default datestyle to YMD (should be fine outside SQL context)
• dual-life makefiles, shared config via includes, specific implementation for GNU and BSD make
• find a sane way to set and install the share directory

Notes

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/datatype-datetime.html

Table 8-14. Date/Time Output Styles

Specification Description Example ISO ISO 8601, SQL standard 1997-12-17 07:37:16-08 SQL traditional style 12/17/1997 07:37:16.00 PST Postgres original style Wed Dec 17 07:37:16 1997 PST German regional style 17.12.1997 07:37:16.00 PST

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/runtime-config-client.html#GUC-DATESTYLE

DateStyle (string)

Sets the display format for date and time values, as well as the rules for interpreting ambiguous date input values. For historical reasons, this variable contains two independent components: the output format specification (ISO, Postgres, SQL, or German) and the input/output specification for year/month/day ordering (DMY, MDY, or YMD). These can be set separately or together. The keywords Euro and European are synonyms for DMY; the keywords US, NonEuro, and NonEuropean are synonyms for MDY. See Section 8.5 for more information. The built-in default is ISO, MDY, but initdb will initialize the configuration file with a setting that corresponds to the behavior of the chosen lc_time locale.

IntervalStyle (enum)

Sets the display format for interval values. The value sql_standard will produce output matching SQL standard interval literals. The value postgres (which is the default) will produce output matching PostgreSQL releases prior to 8.4 when the DateStyle parameter was set to ISO. The value postgres_verbose will produce output matching PostgreSQL releases prior to 8.4 when the DateStyle parameter was set to non-ISO output. The value iso_8601 will produce output matching the time interval "format with designators" defined in section 4.4.3.2 of ISO 8601.

The IntervalStyle parameter also affects the interpretation of ambiguous interval input. See Section 8.5.4 for more information.

Loading of additional timezone abbreviations (like trailing Z)

After pg_timezone_initialize:

TimeZoneAbbrevTable *tzabbr;
if (tzabbr = load_tzoffsets("Default"))
	InstallTimeZoneAbbrevs(tzabbr);

Testing Perl on OSX

Needs "export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=...datizo/lib" before "make test"

License

PostgreSQL license (BSD-like): http://opensource.org/licenses/postgresql