sandycat05,
I am not familiar with Time::localtime. If you used Time::Local, you would find everything you are looking for. Parsing using split or a regex is asking for trouble unless you are certain your data is in a rigid format. Otherwise, there are plenty of other date parsing modules on CPAN that also provide conversion to epoch.

# untested
sub stamp2epoch {
    my $stamp = shift @_;
    my ($yr, $mon, $day, $hr, $min, $sec) = split /[ :-]+/, $stamp;
    --$mon;
    return timelocal($sec, $min, $hr, $day, $mon, $yr);
}
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Update: This post went through a series of rapid updates (code example, warning on using split in addition to regex, disclosure of ignorance with Time::localtime, and this update itself. Blame it on being Monday morning.