The timestamps were entered as free text in a web form.No checking of any kind - pick a format, any format. I have a roughly 200 line perl regexp script that has got (nearly)all of them into ISO format (YYYY-MM-DD).

Did you give Date::Manip a try?? It's a big and slow module but quite good at parsing dates in any format, take a look at the ParseDate function. This could save you from having to program monsters like 200 line regex scripts ...

-- Hofmator