perl awk OR sed, search between two timestamps

Question

I have a file with following sample text. (The actual text is huge).

2014/05/08-19:15:44.544824-
2014/05/08-19:21:54.544824-
2014/0         


        

Answer 1

It may not be obvious, but a date/time representation that has fixed-width fields in decreasing order of magnitude (like ISO 8601 %Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S) can simply be compared as strings, so '19:21:54.544824' gt '19:20' is true, while 19:15:44.544824 lt '19:15' is false.

That means you can just use split to extract the field and do literal comparisons, like this

use strict;
use warnings;

while () {
  my $time = (split /-/)[1];
  print if $time ge '19:15' and $time le '19:20';
}

__DATA__
2014/05/08-19:15:44.544824-
2014/05/08-19:21:54.544824-
2014/05/08-19:34:59.564461-

output

2014/05/08-19:15:44.544824-