Work in epoch seconds and all your problems go away.

See Time::Local and localtime() for converting to/from epoch seconds.

--
Life is a tale told by an idiot -- full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. William Shakespeare, Macbeth

use Time::Local;

#               Second - Min - Hour - Day - Month - Year
my $starttime = timelocal($seconds, $mins, $hours, $day, $month, $year
+);
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$starttime = 1031079733;
$endtime = 1013104442;

$diff = $starttime - $endtime;

print "there is $diff secconds between the 2\n";

$sec = $diff % 60;
$diff = ($diff - $sec) / 60;
$min = $diff % 60;
$diff = ($diff - $min) / 60;
$hrs = $diff % 24;
$diff = ($diff - $hrs) / 24;
$day = $diff % 7;
$diff = ($diff - $day) / 7;
$week = $diff % 4;
$diff = ($diff - $week) / 4;
$mnt = $diff % 12;
$diff = ($diff - $mnt);
$year = $diff;


print "\n\nDifferencre is $year Years $mnt Months $week Weeks $day Day
+s, $hrs Hours, $min Minutes and $sec Seconds\n";
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Oh yes, Time::Local::timelocal() was what i was looking for at the time of my reply!

It would help immensely (to help you) if you post some sample data that you are trying to parse, and not create a HTML paragraph every one-and-a-half sentences.

By the way, there are 3600 seconds in an hour not 360, unless your comment has a typo...

 ...
    }    # I could use: $stime = ($datetemp[3] * 360) + ($datetemp[4] 
+* 60)   # <-- convert to seconds
...
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And since you are repeating the algorithm to generate $stime and $etime, why not create a sub so that you do not have to repeat the same 9-12 lines.

As to your problem, cause is obvious. You are using only the the hours, minutes (and seconds); you NEED to consider the day-of-the-month, month, and year. To calculate elasped time properly, you need to, for start and end time,...

1. extract all five (six) date/time values
2. convert them to the appropriate lowest unit of time measurement
3. take the difference as you are already doing

• Time::Avail - good for things happening with in a week
• Time::Progress - seems to directly solve your problem
• Time::Piece - great for your own time keeping

Date/time manipulations--formatting, calculating deltas etc--is one case where I would definitely advocate not rolling your own. I mostly use Date::Manip (although it is, in the authors words, probably the slowest of the Date/Time modules) and despite the fact that the pod itself needs pod. I beleive Date::Calc is nearly as flexible and a lot faster.

An example of using Date:Manip might help you decide. The following shows the script itself and using it to get the delta between two dates in seconds, minutes, hours, days and weeks.

C:\test>type datemanip.pl
#! perl -slw
use strict;
use Date::Manip;

print Delta_Format( 
    DateCalc( 
        ParseDate($ARGV[0]),
        ParseDate($ARGV[1]) 
    )
    , 0, $ARGV[2]||'%dh'
);


C:\test>datemanip " 2/28/2000 11:57:29 PM" " 3/1/2000 1:40:03 pm" %st
135754.000000

C:\test>datemanip " 2/28/2000 11:57:29 PM" " 3/1/2000 1:40:03 pm" %mt
2262.566667

C:\test>datemanip " 2/28/2000 11:57:29 PM" " 3/1/2000 1:40:03 pm" %ht
37.709444

C:\test>datemanip " 2/28/2000 11:57:29 PM" " 3/1/2000 1:40:03 pm" %dt
1.571227

C:\test>datemanip " 2/28/2000 11:57:29 PM" " 3/1/2000 1:40:03 pm" %wt
0.224461
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# Assume the following values
$start = 'Dec 1 2003 4 00:00 AM';
$end   = 'Jan 2 2004 5 00:00 AM';

($s_seconds, $s_year) = parse($start);
($e_seconds, $e_year) = parse($end);

if ($s_seconds < $e_seconds) {
    $elapsed = $e_seconds - $s_seconds;

} else {
#
# we must have rolled over to a new year so...
# Grab the remaining seconds in the old year + the seconds in the new 
+year
#
   $elapsed = $e_seconds + ( $s_year - $s_seconds );
}

$days    = (split(/\./, $elapsed / 86400))[0];
$rem     = $elapsed - (86400 * $days);

$hours   = (split(/\./, $rem / 3600))[0];
$rem    -= 3600 * $hours;

$mins    = (split(/\./, $rem / 60))[0];
$seconds = $rem - ($mins * 60);

print "Total time was: $days Days $hours Hrs $mins Mins $seconds Secs\
+n";

sub parse {
   my($line) = shift;

   my($mth,$day,$year,$hour,$tosplit,$arg) = split(/\s+/, $line);
   my($min, $sec)                          = split(/:/, $tosplit);

# Add 12 if we are in the PM
   if ($arg =~ /PM/) {
      $hour += 12;

# Set hour to 0 if its 12 AM
   } elsif ($hour == 12) {
      $hour = 0;
   }

   my($base, $total) = this_year($mth, $year);

# beginning of the month + base == # of secs since beginning of year
   my($return) = $base + $sec + ($min * 60) + ($hour * 3600) + ($day *
+ 86400);

   return($return, $total);
}


sub this_year {
   my($mth,$year,$thirty,$thirtyo,$tofind,$base,$total, %months);

   ($mth, $year) = @_;

# number of seconds in a month with thirty days and thirty one days
   $thirty  = "2592000";
   $thirtyo = "2678400";

   %months = (
      Jan => [1, $thirtyo ], Feb => [2, '2419200'], Mar => [3, $thirty
+o],
      Apr => [4, $thirty  ], May => [5, $thirtyo ], Jun => [6, $thirty
+],
      Jul => [7, $thirtyo ], Aug => [8, $thirtyo ], Sep => [9, $thirty
+],
      Oct => [10, $thirtyo], Nov => [11, $thirty ], Dec => [12, $thirt
+yo]
   );

# Stupid calendar system :P
# Man its way to late to be computing leap years.. stupid stupid syste
+m
   if (($year % 4) == 0) {
      $months{Feb}->[1] += '86400';

      if ( ($year % 100) == 0 && ($year % 400) != 0 ) {
         $months{Feb}->[1] -= '86400';
      }
   }

   $tofind = $months{$mth}->[0];

   for ( sort { $months{$a}->[0] <=> $months{$b}->[0] } keys %months )
+ {
      $base  += $months{$_}->[1] if ($tofind >= $months{$_}->[0]);
      $total += $months{$_}->[1];
   }

   return($base,$total);
}
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It needs to be patched to use BigInt so that it can deal with time lengths over I think 300 days or so

Not sure where you got that from: a 31-bit integer will hold enough seconds for about 68 years, which is why most Unix-oriented code (with the epoch starting at Jan 1, 1970) can only handle dates up to Jan 19, 2038.

Hugo

You know what.. you're right... When I was doing testing though, the same algorithm that worked for smaller values got truncated when I tried to compute lengths greater than 1 year. Since it was so early, I just thought I was running out of space in the 'int', and this morning I was thinking about using an array to store the value, but you're right I shouldn't need to.. I'll have to dig in and see if I can figure out whats going on.

/* And the Creator, against his better judgement, wrote man.c */

Thank you all,
    I was having my morning coffee and was thinking about this... I was going to try a whole new approach... Converting to EPOCH... If at the earliest point I could convert to seconds... The math would just be a simple subtract...

    I was going to put these loop into a sub but I was just trying to understand first... I guess more than just placing the code in a script, I need to understand exactly what it's doing (For my own piece of mind)...

You guy are very helpful... Hopefully I can offer you guys some help in the future... Thanks...

Darrick...