in reply to parsing time information from a TAB delimited array, kind of.

Your formatting wasn't entirely clear, but I'm assuming the data will all be on one tab delimited line. I'm also assuming you mean between 17 and 02, not between 02 and 17.
$line = "YYYY-MM-DD\t17:01:00\ttext\t123.456.789.123\t123.456.789.123\ +tURL\tNUMBER\tNUMBER"; $line =~ /.*?\t(\d\d):(\d\d):(\d\d)/; $time = $1*3600 + $2*60 + $3; if ($time >= 31500 && $time <= 43200 || $time <= 7200 || $time >= 6120 +0) { print "It's a match."; }