I'm attempting to dynamically place an image into the user interface of
an intranet site to celebrate various holidays. It's really not
important functionally, but meant to impart just a little fun/whimsy -
which, of course, means I can't spend too much time with it.
Right now I'm running it as a CGI, but I'll probably modify it to run
nightly via a cron job, and just rename an appropriate image from, say,
groundhogsDay.gif to currentHoliday.gif to save processor time. But,
anyway, on to the problem.
to make things easy, I'm using Date::Manip (which, of course, isn't
horribly fast, hence the desire to probably run it as a stand alone,
cron-activated script in the end, rather than a CGI each time a user
does something).
So, I've got a little script like so (for testing finding the right
holiday).
use Date::Manip;
Date_Init(EraseHolidays=0, PersonalCnf=dateManip.conf);
$eventsToday = Events_List(today);
@eventList = @{$eventsToday}; #list in format (date, (list of event
names));
@eventName = @{$eventList[1]}; #second item of list is the list of
event names, ('event 1', 'event 2');
$todayIs = $eventName[0];
print Today is $todayIs\n;
with my dateManip.conf file like so:
*Events
Jan 1 = newYears
3rd Mon in Jan ; 2nd Mon in Jan = MLKDay
Feb 14 ; Feb 7 =
valentinesDay
2nd Sun in May ; May 1 = monthersDay
last Mon in May; 2nd Mon in May = memorialDay
Jul 4 ; last mon in June=
independenceDay
1st mon in sep ; last mon in august = laborDay
2nd Mon in Oct ; 1st Mon in Oct = ColumbusDay
4th Thu in Nov ; 2nd Thu in Nov = Thanksgiving
Dec 25 ; Dec 11 =
Christmas
The idea is, I don't want to necessarily celebrate each holiday for
the same length of time. Now, my two questions.
First, as you can see, I listed events in the format event date ; date
I want the image to first appear. It appears from the date::manip docs
that I should be able to instead do something like event date ; -n
days, for example:
3rd Mon in Feb; -2day = WashingtonB-day
to get a washington's birthday image from the saturday preceding the
3rd monday to the 3rd monday in feb. but, that seems to give strange
results - I always get the next holiday defined that way following the
current date, even if it's listed as -1 day and we're months before it.
Am I misunderstanding how Date::Manip treats its events configuration,
or is this a bug? Any better way to work around it than to make rough
judgements of what should be OK like I did?
The second question: How would one calculate election day here in the
us?
$election = ParseDate(1st Tue after 1st Mon in Nov);
just doesn't quite work. It seems a little obscure. It'd be pretty
simple in a script to find the first tuesday and see if it's the 1st.
But, I can't really do that in the config file, since it is just read
in and the dates parsed when the script is run.
Any ideas there?
TIA
Chad A Gard
http://www.percussionadvocates.com/chad
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