NAME Test::Recent - check a time is recent SYNOPSIS use Test::More; use Test::Recent qw(recent); # check things happened in the last ten seconds recent DateTime->now, "now is recent!"; recent "2012-12-23 00:00:00", "end of mayan calendar happened recently?"; # check things happened in the last hour recent "2012-12-23 00:00:00", DateTime::Duration->new( hours => 1 ), "mayan"; recent "2012-12-23 00:00:00", "1 hour", "mayan" DESCRIPTION Simple module to check things happened recently. Functions These are exported on demand or may be called fully qualified recent $date_and_time recent $date_and_time, $test_description recent $date_and_time, $duration, $test_description Tests (using the Test::Builder framework) if the time occurred within the duration ago from the current time. If no duration is passed, ten seconds is assumed. occured_within_ago $date_and_time, $duration Returns true if and only if the time occurred within the duration ago from the current time. Parsing of DateTimes This module supports the following things being passed in as a date and time: epoch seconds A DateTime object An ISO8601 formatted date string i.e. anything that DateTime::Format::ISO8601 can parse A Postgres style TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE i.e. something of the form "YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.ssssss+TZ" Older versions of this module used DateTimeX::Easy to parse the datetime, but this proved to be unreliable. Overriding the sense of "now" Sometimes you want someone else's concept of *now*. For example, you might want to pull back the time from the database server and compare against that rather than your own local clock. This can be done by setting the $Test::Recent::RelativeTo variable. For safety's sake, this should probably be done with local: { local $Test::Recent::RelativeTo = $dbh->selectcol_arrayref("SELECT NOW()")->[0]; recent($time); } You can set $Test::Recent::RelativeTo to anything that Test::Recent can parse. AUTHOR Written by Mark Fowler COPYRIGHT Copyright OmniTI 2012. All Rights Reserved. Copyright Circonus 2014. All Rights Reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. BUGS This module ignores sub-seconds. This is primarily because the current implementation of DateTime's "now" method does not return nanoseconds, meaning that technically "now" returns a time that is in the past and might occur before a timestamp you hand in that contained nanoseconds (and therefore would erroneously be not concidered "recent") Bugs should be reported via this distribution's CPAN RT queue. This can be found at You can also address issues by forking this distribution on github and sending pull requests. It can be found at In order not to depend on another DateTime library, this module converts postgres style TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE by using a regular expression and simply ignoring microseconds. This potentially introduces a one second inaccuracy in the recent handling. SEE ALSO DateTime::Format::ISO8601, Time::Duration::Parse