I'm a big fan of PHP's strtotime() so I wanted that same functionality in Perl. If you have a date/time string and need a unixtime, then strtotime() is the way to go.

I just released the first public version of Date::Parse::Modern, which is a modern replacement for Date::Parse. Not only does it support more formats than Date::Parse, it's also significantly faster.

In a perfect world this functionality (strtotime) should be in Time::Piece. It's very common in my work flow to read a log file and need to parse the date/time part of the line to a Unixtime.

SQL Server Date Formats

One of the most frequently asked questions in SQL Server forums is how to format a datetime value or column into a specific date format. Here's a summary of the different date formats that come standard in SQL Server as part of the CONVERT function. Following the standard date formats are some extended date formats that are often asked by SQL Server developers.

It is worth to note that the output of these date formats are of VARCHAR data types already and not of DATETIME data type. With this in mind, any date comparisons performed after the datetime value has been formatted are using the VARCHAR value of the date and time and not its original DATETIME value.

Standard Date Formats

If you have tried jQuery Datepicker on input[type=date] in Google Chrome, you might have noticed overlapping calendars of both the jQuery UI and the native calendar popup. If you'd like to apply jQuery Datepicker on all platforms, use input[type=text] instead of input[type=date].