in reply to simple regexp question
Use ? To indicate a character that can appear zero or one time.
For example:
$ perl -e "print '2000-20-30' =~ /\d{4}-?\d{2}-?\d{2}/" 1 $ perl -e "print '20002030' =~ /\d{4}-?\d{2}-?\d{2}/" 1 [download]
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