Date::Parse is nothing new, but I haven't ever really needed it until recently when I had to sort a bunch of date strings.

The dates I need to play look like Sun, 25 Apr 2004 16:08:05 +0200. Sometimes they have the time zone, sometimes they don't. Often they have a lot of different time zones.

Small matter to Date::Parse::str2time()

use Date::Parse qw(str2time);

my $date       = 'Sun, 25 Apr 2004 16:08:05 +0200';
my $epoch_time = str2time( $date );
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Once I have the epoch time, it's easy to go back the other way too, using Date::Format, also in the TimeDate package.