---
name: "Date::Manip::Lang"
section: "3pm"
platform: "linux"
package: "perl-date-manip"
version: "7.00-1"
release: "Arch Linux 2026-11-01"
platforms: ["linux"]
url: "https://new.carta.tech/Date::Manip::Lang"
---

# Date::Manip::Lang(3pm)

language support for Date::Manip

## NAME

Date::Manip::Lang - language support for Date::Manip

## DESCRIPTION

Date::Manip supports a number of different languages when parsing dates, and more can be added.

## CURRENT LANGUAGES

Currently, the following languages are supported by Date::Manip. The version of Date::Manip where they were added is included (so you can see the minimum version of Date::Manip needed to parse each).

The language can be chosen by setting the Language config variable to the name of the language or any of the aliases included in the table.

All names and aliases are case insensitive.

```
   Language     Version  Aliases
   English      default  en, en_us
   Catalan      5.43     ca
   Danish       5.41     da
   Dutch        5.32     Nederlands, nl
   Finnish      6.31     fi, fi_fi
   French       5.02     fr, fr_fr
   German       5.31     de, de_de
   Italian      5.35     it, it_it
   Norwegian    6.21     nb, nb_no
   Polish       5.32     pl, pl_pl
   Portuguese   5.34     pt, pt_pt
   Romanian     5.35     ro, ro_ro
   Russian      5.41     ru, ru_ru
   Spanish      5.33     es, es_es
   Swedish      5.05     sv
   Turkish      5.41     tr, tr_tr
```

## ADDING A LANGUAGE

Adding a language is easily done (if you're fluent in both English and the other language).  If you want to add a new language, do the following:

- Language name

  When you submit the new language, I'll need the name of the language (of course) and any common locale names that might be useful for people to select the language.

  For example, if you were creating a Spanish translation (which is not necessary since it already exists), I would need the following list:

  ```
     spanish es es_es
  ```

- Copy the english module

  Copy the english.pm file (which is in lib/Date/Manip/Lang in the Date::Manip distribution) to the new language (i.e. spanish.pm in this example).

- Set some variables in the new module

  The new module (spanish.pm) will need a few simple modifications. Change the package name from 'english' to 'spanish'.

  Fix the `@Encodings` lines.  Most languages can be written in more than one encoding.  The first encoding in the list should be utf-8 and the last should be perl.  Include any other encodings that should be supported as well.

  Set the `$YearAdded` and `$LangName` appropriately.

- Translate the language terms

  The data section of the module is fairly straightforward to translate.

  Every term is defined in the Date::Manip::Lang::english document (or in any of the other language module documents), so please refer to it to find out what each element means.  Then replace the English version with the new translation.

  There are some requirements:

  1\) Every element should be defined (except for the sephm and sepms elements which are optional).

  2\) The module must be written using UTF-8 characters if the language includes any non-ASCII characters.

  3\) Each element includes a list of values (different variations of the element).  In most cases, the order of the values for each element is not important since they are just used to create a regular expression for parsing dates, but a few of them are also used to determine printable values using the `"Date::Manip::Date::printf"` method (or the `"UnixDate"` function).  These elements are:

  ```
     Element       printf directive
     ampm          %p
     day_abb       %a
     day_char      %v
     day_name      %A
     month_abb     %b
     month_name    %B
     nth           %E
  ```

  For each of these, the value that should be printed out must be the first value in the list.

  4\) When possible, if a language includes characters that are essentially ASCII characters with a punctuation mark, please include a variation of the value which is just ASCII with the punctuation removed.  For example, the spanish name for Saturday in ASCII would be written sabado, but in reality, the first 'a' has an accent over it. This word should appear twice... first in full UTF-8 encoding, and second as all ASCII. If the language (Russian for example) has no ASCII equivalent, just include the UTF-8 representation.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

## LANGUAGE SPECIFIC RULES

In the language file, there is one special value named \_special\_rules. This is a hash of special parsing rules that will be applied for this language.

Currently the following rules are available:

- remove\_trailing\_period

  If this is set, trailing periods will be removed.

  For example, in German, default output of the date command includes a day of month with a trailing period.  For example:

  ```
     Mo 3. Jan 11:00:00 EST 2022
  ```

  If this rule is set, periods followed by whitespace (or an end of string) are stripped.

- remove\_parens

  This will strip parentheses () from a string.

- strip\_word

  This is a list of words that will be stripped from a string.  Each word must be bracketed by the start/end of the string or whitespace.

## SEE ALSO

Date::Manip        - main module documentation

## LICENSE

This script is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

## AUTHOR

Sullivan Beck (https://github.com/SBECK-github/)