I ended up removing the dates by generating regex from the strftime format to match them, using this:

sub timestamp2regex {
    my $exp = shift;
    my %metareplacements = (
        'D' => '%m/%d/%y',        'F' => '%Y-%m-%d',
        'r' => '%I:%M:%S %p',     'R' => '%H:%M',
        'T' => '%H:%M:%S'
    );
    my %replacements = (
        'a' => '[[:alpha:]]+',    'A' => '[[:alpha:]]+',
        'b' => '[[:alpha:]]+',    'B' => '[[:alpha:]]+',
        'd' => '\d{2}',           'e' => '[\d\s]\d',
        'g' => '\d{2}',           'G' => '\d{4}',
        'h' => '[[:alpha:]]+',    'H' => '\d{2}',
        'I' => '\d{2}',           'j' => '\d{3}',
        'k' => '[\d\s]\d',        'l' => '[\d\s]\d',
        'm' => '\d{2}',           'M' => '\d{2}',
        'p' => '[A-Za-z.]{2,}',   'P' => '[A-Za-z.]{2,}',
        's' => '\d+',             'S' => '\d{2}',
        't' => '\t',              'u' => '\d',
        'U' => '\d{2}',           'V' => '\d{2}',
        'w' => '\d',              'W' => '\d{2}',
        'y' => '\d{2}',           'Y' => '\d{4}',
        'z' => '[+-]\d{4}',       'Z' => '[[:alpha:]]*',
        '%' => '\%'
    );

    $exp = quotemeta($exp);
    $exp =~ s/\\\%\\?(.)/
        if (defined $metareplacements{$1}) {
            timestamp2regex($metareplacements{$1});
        } elsif (defined $replacements{$1}) {
            $replacements{$1};
        } else {
            croak "Unsupported or unrecognized timestamp format token:
+ \%$1.";
        }/eg;
    return $exp;
}
[download]

(This turned out to be much easier to write than I expected, after I gave up with locales.)

This isn't completely ideal, because it doesn't accept anything locale-related (it will croak on %c, %E, %O, %x, and %X), but I don't think those are actually going to be used. After writing this, I discovered Regexp::Common::time, which appears to be exactly what I was after (and somewhat what this code does), but it's much longer than my code, and I'm not sure if it handles certain things (like non-English AM/PM) as well as my code does. If I run into any locale issues with mine, though, I'll probably switch to that.

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