All,
Does anyone know a robust date string parsing module that fits the following criterion:

• Written in pure perl
• Does not have a laundry list of dependencies
• Is not part of a bundle of other un-wanted modules
• Well documented
• Provides the ability to control behavior when multiple dates are possible

As far as I can tell, Date::Manip seems to be the only contender fitting items 1-3. Unfortunately it fails on items 4 and 5. The sparse documentation doesn't exhaustively list all the formats it understands nor what it would do in the circumstance of '02/01/03'. Instead, it says things like:

In the documentation below, US formats are used, but in most (if not all) cases, a non-English equivalent will work equally well.

As well as

Parsing a date from any convenient format

Here is the approach I was going to take:

• Generate a list of dates I need it to parse
• See which ones it fails on and parse by hand
• See which ones it gets wrong and parse by hand

The thing is - it seems silly to use a module if I am having to still do corner cases by hand.

Any insight into other modules would be appreciated.

---

---

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! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

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:
	&		&
	<		&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.