Question

When I query a data source directly on an SQL server, there is date and time stamp column returning in a format shown below.

2011-05-26 16:19:20
2013-01-10 15:20:35
2008-01-10 14:51:01
2013-01-10 17:40:31
2008-03-26 18:23:20
2010-03-04 16:18:14

However, when I query that same data source in a perl script and write the results to a .txt file, the date format writes as shown below.

Jun 14 2011 10:49AM
Jun 17 2010 04:23PM
Aug 13 2010 08:28AM
Jun 18 2007 08:41AM
Jul 26 2012 07:18PM
Jun 11 2010 11:37AM
Aug 20 2010 09:28AM

SQL Query:

SELECT TOP 100 PERCENT UserNM AS [User ID], MAX(EventDT) AS [Last Login Date]
FROM    dbo.WFEventLog
GROUP BY UserNM
ORDER BY UserNM

Script Section for Writing to File:

open(FILE, ">cleanup.txt") || die "$!\n";

    while( my $hash_ref = $sth->fetchrow_hashref ){

        my $userid = "$hash_ref->{'UserID'}";
        my $logindt = "$hash_ref->{'Last Login Date'}";

            # dump all registered users into .csv file
            print FILE "$userid \t $logindt\n";

    }

close(FILE);

What I am looking for is the exact format from the SQL results to be written to the file. For some reason there is a reformat happening before that is happening that I do not want.

Answer 1

I’m assuming you want them in identical format. I’d see first if the database will format it for you, but seeing as I don’t know what database you’re dealing with, perl has several modules that are good for this purpose. The granddaddy of them all is Date::Manip. To format your dates in the format as output by the database, you would:

UnixDate(ParseDate($in), '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S';