Time::Duration::Parse is a module to parse human readable duration strings like 2 minutes and 3 seconds to seconds. It does the opposite of duration_exact function in Time::Duration and is roundtrip safe. So, the following is always true. use Time::Duration::Parse; use Time::Duration; my $seconds = int rand 100000; is( parse_duration(duration_exact($seconds)), $seconds ); WWW: http://search.cpan.org/dist/Time-Duration-Parse/