in reply to regular expression help

I think the simple, straight-forward answer is: don't. Use a regular expression to pull apart the data, and do minor syntax checking, and use other date-related modules to do semantic checking.

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Re^2: regular expression help
by ikegami (Patriarch) on Jul 26, 2005 at 21:19 UTC
    Here's a solution that uses the core module Time::Local 
    use Time::Local qw( timegm );

/(\d{4})[-\/.](\d{2})[-\/.](\d{2})/
  or die("Bad format\n");

my $time = eval { timegm(0, 0, 0, $3, $2, $1) };
die("Bad date\n") if $@;

    [download]
    Switch timegm for timelocal if you prefer.
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