What do you mean by "just fails"? Your code worked perfectly for me.

$ perl -MPOSIX -e 'print POSIX::strftime("%d-%m-%Y %H:%M:%S", localtime),"\n"'

03-02-2004 11:21:07

Try this instead of using POSIX functions


(@date)=localtime;
$date[5]+=1900;$date[4]++;
$now=sprintf("%0.2d-%0.2d-%0.4d %0.2d:%0.2d:%0.2d",$date[3],$date[4]++, $date[5], $date[2],$date[1],$date[0]);
print "$now";


HTH
--Paul

When I try

sub now {
   
   my $now = POSIX::strftime("%d-%m-%Y %H:%M:%S", localtime);

    return $now;
}


All i get is.......

CGI Error
The specified CGI application misbehaved by not returning a complete set of HTTP headers. The headers it did return are:


DBD::ODBC::st execute failed: [Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver]Invalid character value for cast specification (SQL-22018)(DBD: st_execute/SQLExecute err=-1) at lib/dbase.pm line 78.
DBD::ODBC::st execute failed: [Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver]Invalid character value for cast specification (SQL-22018)(DBD: st_execute/SQLExecute err=-1) at lib/dbase.pm line 78.

Looks like you've an SQL error at line 78.

I don't see why ....

This will work:

my $now = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S", localtime);

But this throws an error!

my $now = POSIX::strftime("%d-%m-%Y %H:%M:%S", localtime);

I would guess that you're using $now to insert into the database, but it's not in a date format that your SQL server understands.

So how do I configure SQL Server to understand my date format?

The Language settings on the Database Server are set to English (United States).  This is probably the reason why I am getting this error, as rosenk has suggested.

Unfortunately, I cannot verify this by testing it as I cannot reboot the server.

Most (if not all) SQL DBs behave like that, i.e. accepting dates in yyyy-mm-dd format. This is because of the ambiguities involved in doing it any other way, for example 02/03/2004 is the second of March in Europe, while it's the third of February in the US. The yyyy-mm-dd format is the international standard for representing dates, since nobody would agree to use the *other*     od.

I think we should all just adopt the British format.  It would save us a lot of fuss over here in the UK.  ;O)

You're probably best off keeping two variables, one for display to your users and one for inserting into the database.  If all of the database interaction code is isolated, I'd make $now be for display and create a new variable for use with the database -- whichever way would involve the fewest changes.