G'day Ma,

I find the builtin module Time::Piece is particularly good at handling this type of task:

#!/usr/bin/env perl -l

use strict;
use warnings;

use Time::Piece;

my $date_string = 'Oct 31 08:30';

my $t = Time::Piece->strptime($date_string, '%b %d %H:%M');

print 'Day=', $t->mday, ' Month=', $t->mon;
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Output (exactly as requested):

Day=31 Month=10
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