If the format of the dates in your text file are consistant, there may be no need to parse the dates in it...

use warnings;
use strict;
use Date::EzDate;

#Date::EzDate can parse several date formats w/o intervention,
#so let's make life easy for end-users by making the input format 
#flexible.
my $date_in = 'Mar 13, 04';
my $date = Date::EzDate->new($date_in)
    or die "Couldn't parse the date '$date_in'.\n";

#convert the date to a string that will match the consistent format
#in our DATA file.  Note that this will only work if the date format 
#in the file is, in fact, consistent.
my $match_date = $date->{'%f/%h/%Y'};

print "Looking for matches on $match_date:\n";
while (<DATA>) {
    #a regex match might work as well as splitting

    #note that there is no need to split the date since we're just
    #matching strings
    print if $match_date eq (split)[2];
}
1;

__DATA__
blah blah 1/Feb/2004 Gamera
blah blah 13/Mar/2004 Godzilla
blah blah 22/Jan/2004 Mothra
blah blah 3/Apr/2004 Baragon
blah blah 13/Feb/2004 Guiron
blah blah 5/Feb/2004 King Ghidorah
blah blah 27/Mar/2004 Legion
blah blah 13/Mar/2004 Mechagodzilla

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In reply to Re: Parsing a date from comma-delimited file by Art_XIV
in thread Parsing a date from comma-delimited file by playing18

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