Below is a code that extracts dates from files in a given directory. What i need help with is now getting these dates to print out in a dd-mmm-yyyy format?? I think the answer lies with putting the date, month and year values found into variables (backreferencing in pattern matching), then manipulating the contents of those variables as strings in order to get the required results. 
$month = '(?:Jan(?:uary)?|Feb(?:ruary)?|Mar(?:ch)?
            |Apr(?:il)?|May|Jun(?:e)?
            |Jul(?:y)?|Aug(?:ust)?|Sep(?:tember)?
            |Oct(?:ober)?|Nov(?:ember)?|Dec(?:ember)?)\s+';
$day = '[0-3]?[0-9](?:th|st|nd|rd)?,?\s+'; 
$year = '[0-9]{2,4}';
$dir= "c:/texts/";
$out="c:/scripts/out.txt";
open OUT, ">$out" or die "Cannot open $out for write :$!";
opendir(DIRECTORY, $dir) or die "Can't open $dir: $!\n";

while($file = readdir DIRECTORY){ 
    next if $file=~/^\./; 
    $rfname=$dir . $file;
 
    open (CONT, $rfname); 
    while (<CONT>){ 
        if(/( 
               (?:${day}${month}${year}) 
               |
               (?:${month}${day}${year})
            )
        /ixo) {
    
            print OUT "$file\t $1\n"; 
        } 
    } 
}

[download]
thanks in advance...

In reply to Data normalisation by Perl-chick

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