Perl convert YYYYMMDD to 16digit epoch time
<p>Is there a perl function that converts YYYYMMDD to a 16digit epoch time?</p>

<p>I'm currently calling the date command:</p>

<pre><code>date -d 20160219 +%s%6N
</code></pre>

<p>for the conversion but my script takes a long time to go through the millions of dates in my data set.</p>

<p>By "16digit epoch time", I mean a 16-digit decimal integer representing microseconds since the epoch. For example, <code>2016-02-19 00:00:00 UTC</code> is 1455840000 seconds after the epoch, so the result I want is <code>"1455840000000000"</code>.</p>