Win8 Strawberry 5.30.3.1 (64) Mon 05/09/2022 0:45:49 C:\@Work\Perl\monks >perl use strict; use warnings; use JSON; use Data::Dump qw(dd); my $json_string = <<'EOJ'; [["urlkey","timestamp","original","mimetype","statuscode","digest","length"], ["org,archive)/", "19970126045828", "http://www.archive.org:80/", "text/html", "200", "Q4YULN754FHV2U6Q5JUT6Q2P57WEWNNY", "1415"], ["org,archive)/", "19971011050034", "http://www.archive.org:80/", "text/html", "200", "XAHDNHZ5P3GSSSNJ3DMEOJF7BMCCPZR3", "1402"], ["org,archive)/", "19971211122953", "http://www.archive.org:80/", "text/html", "200", "XAHDNHZ5P3GSSSNJ3DMEOJF7BMCCPZR3", "1405"]] EOJ my $ar_decoded_json = decode_json $json_string; # dd $ar_decoded_json; # for debug my $first_timestamp = $ar_decoded_json->[1][1]; print "'$first_timestamp' \n"; ^Z '19970126045828'