I've been trying to find date strings of different formats using regexes, but it seems really cumbersome, and almost illegible. Any suggestions as to how I can tidy this code up without skipping any strings? Also, would like to trim the comma char...not sure how. Can anyone help? My data is a series of large text files containing phone numbers, names, post codes, long sentences... 
while(<FH1>)
 {

    if #(/(19\d{2})/gi)
    (
    (/(\d{1,2}\-\d{1,2}\s\w+\s(19\d{2}))/gi)
    ||
    (/(\d{1,2}\w{2}\s\w+\s(19\d{2}))/gi)
    ||
    (/(\d{1,2}\s\w+\s(19\d{2}))/gi)
    ||
    (/(\w+\s\d{1,2},\s(19\d{2}))/gi)
    ||
    (/(\w+\s\d{1,2}\-\d{1,2},\s(19\d{2}))/gi)
    )
  {

    print OUTFILE ("$filename\t $1\t \n");

  }
  }

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In reply to My code seems messy... by PerlGrrl

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