With the particular format you're asking about, a regex shouldn't be that difficult, especially when you're not concerned with validity: something like this:

m!^[0-9]{4}[/\-.][0-9]{1,2}[/\-.][0-9]{1,2}$#!
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which, if my regex memory works, will match a string which starts three groups of digits separated by slashes, hyphens, or periods, where the first group has 4 digits, and the second and third groups have 1 or 2 digits. I would do some minimal validation (to throw out clearly invalid values for month or day, such as 93), so it's more likely I'd use a regex like this one:

m/^\d{4}[\/\-.](1[0-2])|0?[1-9])[\/\-.]([012]?[0-9]|3[01]$/<p>
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Which, if my regex juju is still working, will match a string comprising three groups, separated by slashes, hyphens, or periods, where the first group has 4 digits, the second a number in the range 1 through 12, and the third a number in the range 0 (oops!) through 31. I know there is no day of the month numbered 0, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Another way to do this is to use split, breaking the string on the required separator, something like this:

($year, $month, $day) = split(/[.\-\/]/, $date, 3);
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