Well, you can capture (and assign) multiple parts of your expression in one go. So something like this:

my ($year, $month, $day) = $maxdate =~ m/(\d+)-(\d+)-(\d+)/;
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Of course, with your sample you could do the same thing using split, eg:

my ($year, $month, $day) = split /-/, $maxdate;
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But if you want something more robust and reliable, that can deal with different date formats - then you should look at one of the Date parsing modules available on CPAN.

Cheers,
Darren :)

How about this?

my $maxdate = "2006-06-06";
my( $m_year, $m_month ) = split /-/, $maxdate;
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Sometimes it's about using the right tool for the task. split comes in handy.

Things clean up somwhat when you change the substitute to a match and know that the match returns the list of captured strings in list context:

use strict;
use warnings;

my $maxdate = "2006-06-05";
my ($m_year, $m_month, $d_day) = $maxdate =~ m/(^\d+)\-(\d+)-(\d+)/;

print "year: $m_year, Month: $m_month, Day: $d_day\n";
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Prints:

year: 2006, Month: 06, Day: 05
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my $maxdate            =  "2006-06-06";
my ($m_year, $m_month) =   unpack 'A4 x A2', $maxdate;
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If you just want to get the year and month part of the date, try this:

use Date::Manip; 
my $maxdate = "2006-05-11"; 
my($m_year, $m_month) = UnixDate($maxdate, "%Y", "%m");
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