You could reduce the length of the string in a "brute force" way using substr. For something more elegant, you'd probably need regexen. Here's an example which deletes the date as you suggested.

s/\[.*\]//;
[download]

For more info on this kind of thing you should read perlre and perlop.

--
<http://www.dave.org.uk>

"Perl makes the fun jobs fun
and the boring jobs bearable" - me