I have no idea what a $yday is!
If you just need some tokens from this line like day and year: 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $string= "Wednesday, May 20, 2009 2:09 PM";

my ($day, $year) = (my @tokens = split(/[,\s]+/,$string))[0,3];

print "@tokens \n";
print "day =$day  year =$year\n";
__END__
PRINTS:
Wednesday May 20 2009 2:09 PM 
day =Wednesday  year =2009

[download]
Update: I'll add a bit more for you...split() is a function that parses a scalar value (here its just one line) and creates a list. In this case we "split" on any sequence of one (or more) comma's or space characters (\n\t\r\s\f). These go into the @tokens list. Perl has a very cool syntax called a "list slice", here I say give the first and fourth things which are the day and the year. "my @tokens =" is an intermediate variable that doesn't need to exist, I put it there so you could see the effect of the split.

Give some examples of what need...short thing with couple of input lines and couple of output lines.

In reply to Re: Date String Conversion by Marshall
in thread Date String Conversion by Lunitech

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