I would multiply the minutes by 60, divide the milliseconds by 1000 and add the resulting two values to the seconds you were given.

Of course to extract the minutes, seconds, ms you may want to use split or some regular expression

Cheers,
R.

Thank you all and thanks Random_Walk for providing the simple solution for this. I loved writing my first simple perl script. :)

Here is the script I created taking a string from the log (though hard coded).

Read more... (1035 Bytes)
Suggestions are welcome.

I am glad you enjoyed it. Perl coding is fun. I do have a couple of suggestions

suggestion 1: use strict and warnings. These will alert you to dangerous coding practices. They are a great way to learn to write solid code.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
[download]

:-)

OK here is a version of your code tidied up a bit, compiling under strict and not throwing warnings

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

# switch one in for testing each case. 
#
# my $statement = "File extraction sucessfully completed in 8s 180ms";
my $statement = "File extraction sucessfully completed in 3min 8s";
# my $statement = "File extraction sucessfully completed in too much t
+ime";

my @values = split(/\s+/, $statement); # split on any number/sort of w
+hitespace

my @time;
$time[0] = pop @values;
$time[1] = pop @values;

# or use and array slice
# my @time = @values[-2,-1];

my $seconds = 0;
for my $val (@time) {
   if    ($val =~ s/min$//) {
      $seconds = $seconds + $val * 60;
   }
   elsif ($val =~ s/ms$//) {
      $seconds = $seconds + $val / 1000;
   }
   elsif ($val =~ s/s$//) {
      $seconds = $seconds + $val;
   }
   else {
      print "Warning, strange value in expected time field: $val\n";
      exit;
   }
}
print "Total time taken: $seconds seconds \n"
[download]

Cheers,
R.

Pereant, qui ante nos nostra dixerunt!

Hi, I am new to Perl. I've got a task to convert a given time (e.g, 6 minutes 30 secs or 24 secs 50 millisecs) completely in seconds.

Welcome to the Monastery Lucifer.
The problem with your question is what I refer to as "problem definition." What format is your input being resented as (eg. 00:00:00.000 would be one way).

While you are at it check out Understanding and Using Perl Monks so that you can effectively ask questions that yield useful answers.

What have you tried?

I would start here: http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/time.html. Are you timing a specific program? If you are parsing logs, then you can read in the values and use a regular expression to pull out the corresponding numbers since you would know the output format. You can divide or multiply as necessary at that point.

Thanks!