Still no clear question, only a bunch of weird code! :(

That's what you want?

  DB<159> @date = (" PERIOD 13 OCT 06 OCT" =~ m/ PERIOD (\d\d) (\w\w\w
+) (\d\d) (\w\w\w)/) 
 => (13, "OCT", "06", "OCT")
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If you only need the first letter of the month to be capitalized, try only matching the first letter and the rest, and process them accordingly with lc() or '\U' and '\L' in s///ubstitutions.

UPDATE

another way to do it, see ucfirst() (a command I've never used before =)...

  DB<164> ucfirst lc $date[1]
 => "Oct"
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