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

Hazah! I'm Employed!