It really depends on whether your task is to take specified input and validate and parse it, or look for any date-like thing in the input. Without the anchors, m:\d{2}/\d{2}/\d{2}: will quite happily match the "04/08/84" in
"123/3/104/08/840/2".
Comment on Re: Re: Re: more date conversion happiness, part 3
Indeed...I did some experimenting with that. This particular assignment had a very specific input it had to deal with. But I'm working on something right now that will use the anchors for exactly what you mentioned. Thanks!