Course of Raku / Advanced / More about built-in types / Date and time

Working with time

When you need the time of day as well as the date, use the DateTime type. It is created much like a Date, but you also give the hour, minute, and second:

my $dt = DateTime.new(2026, 6, 27, 14, 30, 0);
say $dt; # 2026-06-27T14:30:00Z

The default text form follows the ISO 8601 standard: the date, the letter T, the time, and a trailing Z for the UTC time zone.

A DateTime gives access to the time parts, in addition to the date parts you already know:

my $dt = DateTime.new(2026, 6, 27, 14, 30, 0);
say $dt.hour;   # 14
say $dt.minute; # 30

To get the current moment, call DateTime.now. As with Date.today, we do not show its output, because it changes every time the program runs.

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