I had a similar problem reading dates from a text file in order to report on projected developer headcount, and here's what worked for me

use Date::Manip;                    # For ParseDate()'s ability to 
                                    # handle non-ISO date formats 
                                    # like "today"

use Date::Calc qw (Decode_Date_EU); # For Decode_Date_EU()'s ability 
                                    # to handle extra bits that 
                                    # ParseDate() doesn't

use Date::Simple qw (today);        # For convenience, and for 
                                    # compatibility with Date::Range

sub DateSimple {
    # Try hard to turn a string into Date::Simple

    my $workdate = shift;
    
    # First try ParseDate
    my $date=UnixDate(ParseDate($workdate),"%Y-%m-%d");
    
    # If that didn't work then give Decode_Date_EU a try
    unless ($date) {
        $workdate =~ s/(\d)[a-z]{2}/$1/ig; # Remove number suffixes
        if (my ($year,$month,$day) = Decode_Date_EU($workdate)) {
            $date = sprintf("%04i-%02i-%02i",$year,$month,$day);
        }
    }

    $date ? Date::Simple->new($date) : undef;
}
[download]