Michael,
You will inevitably be pointed to one of a myriad of modules on CPAN to do this. The reason being is that, generally speaking, using regexes to parse dates has the same problems as IP addresses, email addresses, HTML, XML, etc. These modules may still use regexes but they are more robust and have considered far more edge cases then the casual user trying to solve the problem for the first time.

On the other hand - if you are absolutely sure of your data then using a regex may be a fine way to go.

my $year = (split m|[/ ]|, $date)[2];

Cheers - L~R


In reply to Re: Parsing the year out of date by Limbic~Region
in thread Parsing the year out of date by Anonymous Monk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.