More elegant way to get timestamp from day/hour? (Perl)
There's a timestamp file available here: http://coolwx.com/buoydata/data/curr/timestamp, so I think it'll be easier if you download and parse both data and timestamp files. 

You can parse the timestamp with this with %Y%m%d%H pattern, for example using core Time::Piece module and its strptime function: 

use Time::Piece;
my $time = Time::Piece-&gt;strptime("2013092616", "%Y%m%d%H"); # Time::Piece object, see docs
say $time-&gt;datetime; # outputs: 2013-09-26T16:00:00


See documentation for more formatting methods of Time::Piece object.