I realize this is an old post to be replying to, but hit it when messing with &ParseRecur() and thought I'd chime in.

The thing to keep in mind about Date::Manip is that it almost doesn't *care* what format you hand it dates. If you can parse it in your head to come out to a legitimate date, chances are good it can too. Admittedly you can get in a lot of trouble this way, but for amusement some time, take a form with a text input for a date field, release it to the general public and then just parse that field with Date::Manip; log results however you like.

When I did this, I was astonished by the ludicrous number of what I would have considered to be bogus dates that Date::Manip did something intelligent with. It might have returned a partial date at times (and considering your own circumstances, this might be a very bad thing), but it successfully handled *far* more than I had hoped for.

Yes, it's a beast of a module... it's still getting my vote for basic prototyping and all but the most speed-critical code. It's just too keen.