How to compare time in perl

abhishes has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello Perl Monks!

I am parsing a file where I find strings of the following pattern 2003/02/05 17:32:06.179

I am able to extract the year, month, day, hour, minute, second and millisecond from this string using a regular expression.

But if I have two such strings how to find out which of the two is smaller. Is there a speedy way to compare two such strings for time.

Thanks for your help in advance.

regards,
Abhishek.