in reply to formatting datetime with strftime

Perhaps you could employ Date::Manip instead of doing it all by hand

use Date::Manip;
print UnixDate('05/1/13 16:45 GMT', '%b %d %Y %T %Z');

[download]
Output: 
May 01 2013 16:45:00 GMT

[download]

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom