How is the time stored? Is it just a time, or is there a date as well? Or will you always be working with times from the same date?

You might find Time::Local useful to change your times back to seconds since the epoch. Once there, this is just a couple numerical comparisons.

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";

select 1 
where $my_date_time > $start_date_time 
and $my_date_time < $end_date_time
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start | end
-----------
22:00 | 04:00
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start | end_after_minutes
----------------
22:00 | 360
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select 1 
where $my_date_time > $start_date_time 
and $my_date_time < $end_date_time
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That’s un-SQLish. It can be better written as

SELECT 1 
WHERE $my_date_time BETWEEN $start_date_time AND $end_date_time
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(And of course, you’d pass the values in using placeholders, not by interpolating them into the SQL.)

Makeshifts last the longest.

Absolutely, on both points. I was trying to make the logic as clear as possible for the OP.

(also, I'm not sure whether all SQL dialects support BETWEEN)

You could try Date::Calc as it has some good functions for comparing Time / Dates. I have used it many times.

Might be something that will help you in there.

The other thing that you could try is to convert the Date / Time into Epoc seconds which I find much easier to then run checks on.

Al

My guess is that you also have a date field in the database for the record time. If you do, then I would convert the date/time to unixtime and then do the comparison:

use HTTP::Date;

my $start_time = str2time('2005-10-01 22:00:00');
my $end_time   = str2time('2005-10-02 04:00:00');

my $check_time = str2time('2005-10-01 22:40:00');

if ($start_time < $end_time) {
    if ($start_time < $check_time
        and
        $check_time < $end_time) {
        print "yes\n";
    }
    else {
        print "no\n";
    }
}
elsif ($end_time < $start_time) {
    if ($end_time < $check_time
        and
        $check_time < $start_time) {
        print "yes\n";
    }
    else {
        print "no\n";
    }
}
else {
    print "Start and End times are identical\n";
}
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For the sake of clarity, I left out retrieving the db times and left them as strings. Also, as others have pointed out, this is easily doable in the db with a simple SQL query:

SELECT 1 WHERE check_time BETWEEN start_time AND end_time
or
SELECT 1 WHERE concat(check_date, ' ', check_time) BETWEEN concat(star
+t_date, ' ', start_time) AND concat(end_date, ' ', end_time)
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# WARNING -- it's left to the reader to properly compare the values (c
+an't do '01:40' < '01:30')
if start <= end
  return 1 if start <= t and t <= end
else   # end < start
  return 1 if  ( start <= t and t <= 23:59 ) or ( 00:00 <= t and t <= 
+end )
endif
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