There's a standard module (as in "comes with perl"), Time::Local, which provides inverse functions for localtime and gmtime: timelocal() and timegm(). These can convert dates/times in a list format, (ss, mm, hh, dd, MM, yyyy), to an epoch time. As explained in How do I find the difference in days between two dates, in a cool perl way? which was pointed to in another reply, this is a number of seconds since, typically, January 1st 1970, 00:00:00 GMT. That is the case on Unix and Windows, at least.

So first you must get your year/month/day out of the string: 

$date = '05-02-2003';
my($d,$m,$y) = $date =~ /(\d+)-(\d+)-(\d+)/;

[download]
Subtract 1 from the month, as January is month 0. Seconds since the epoch can be found like this: 
use Time::Local;
my $time = timegm(0, 0, 0, $d, $m-1, $y);

[download]
I use midnight, and GMT, as a reference, with regards to summer time issues — GMT doesn't have them. If you desire finer results, with an exact hours/minutes/seconds count, you can always use timelocal(), and real times.

The calculated value is 1044403200. You can see that it works well, like this: 

print scalar gmtime($time);

[download]
which produces 
Wed Feb  5 00:00:00 2003

[download]
 OK?

In reply to Re: Converting dates by bart
in thread Converting dates by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.