Ive been racking my brain about this for the past 3 days, and have gone about through several ways I could accomplish the task at hand, but all of them have seeminly run into a brick wall of sorts.

The problem is this: I have output from a database ordered by the entry date field, there are three types of data 'open', 'hold', and 'closed'. What I am attempting to do is add up the total time of the 'open' data MINUS the entries that are on hold...so..
Date: Jan 1 2001 3:30PM | ID: 1 | Code: open Date: Jan 1 2001 3:35PM | ID: 1 | Code: open Date: Jan 1 2001 3:37PM | ID: 1 | Code: hold Date: Jan 1 2001 3:46PM | ID: 1 | Code: hold Date: Jan 1 2001 4:10PM | ID: 1 | Code: open Date: Jan 1 2001 4:35PM | ID: 1 | Code: hold
Ive already written small subroutines to get my dates into unix epoch seconds, but I just cant find a decent way to calculate how long the 'ID' had an 'open' code and have been banging my head repeadatly at my desk with wrong numbers aplenty...I am pleading for help.

In reply to Funky date question. by Mark 1

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.