A few monks already helped you over the octal problem, yet nobody did bite yet on your 5th regex problem.

One of the reasons might be, that it isn't a problem, as you will notice when you execute the following code snippet from the command line:

perl -e 'my $date = "08 Apr 1984";$date =~ /(\d{1,2})\s([a-zA-Z]{3})\s(\d{4})/;print "$1:$2:$3\n";'

The output of this code snippet is: 08:Apr:1984. So no problem exists with your 5th regex.

You might want to (a) read up on backreferences (the brackets () and the funny variables: $1, $2, $3, etc, used by me in the snippet) and (b) make your code verbose in a debugging sense.

Debugging is the tracking down of errors. And one of the easier ways to debug code is to print out each variable you use before and after you modified it. You also might want to see what your expressions (in the if, elsif, etc statements) return.

Once your print statements return values you didn't expect, you have a starting point for a close inspection.

/oliver/