cpiety,
...yyyymmddhhmmss or any other useable date time format

You are going to need to define what you mean since it already appears to be in the first format. Likely, you probably want to use Time::Local, and then use strftime from POSIX to format however you want. Both modules are part of the core. 

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Time::Local;
use POSIX 'strftime';

my $str = '19980730010031';
my $epoch = get_epoch( $str );
print strftime("%m/%d/%Y", localtime($epoch));

sub get_epoch {
    my $str = shift;
    my ($yr, $mon, $day, $hr, $min, $sec) = unpack('A4A2A2A2A2A2', $st
+r);
    $mon--;
    return timelocal($sec, $min, $hr, $day, $mon, $yr);
}

[download]
Incidently, $epoch is number of seconds since epoch so it is easy to calculate the difference between two stamps just by subtracting and dividing by the appropriate number of seconds (86_400 if you want the difference in days).

Cheers - L~R

In reply to Re: changing a string to a useable date time by Limbic~Region
in thread changing a string to a useable date time by cpiety

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