Trying to convert date from a line of text

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi,
I'm trying to write a script which will parse a line and try and extract some date information from it. The lines come from letters so, as far as I can tell, don't have a standard pattern. They can be:
"Thursday, 12th March 1843"
"12th March 1843"
"1843"
I'm trying to write a regex to find the months and if something like a month appears, turn it into a number and looking for some help in getting the month converted as I've gone down a wrong road and would like some directions back the right way.

# sub to print date
sub get_date {
  my $text = shift or die "No date object passed through";
  
  my %months  = (JAN => '01', FEB => '02', MAR => '03', 
                APR => '04', MAY=> '05', JUN => '06', 
            JUL => '07', AUG => '08', SEP => '09', 
        OCT => '10', NOV => '11', DEC => '12');
                
  my $dttime = $text =~ m/((?<=_).*)/;
  $dttime = $1;
  
  my $month = $dttime =~ s/(\w{3}).*/$months{uc $1}/;
  $month = $1;
  
  my $year = $dttime =~ m/(\d{4})/;
  $year = $2;

  $dttime = $month . "-" . $year;
  return $dttime;
}
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Re: Trying to convert date from a line of text by grep (Monsignor) on Jul 07, 2009 at 21:10 UTC
I like the DateTime modules and found DateTime::Format::Natural::Lang::EN to be extremely useful. grep `One dead unjugged rabbit fish later...`	[reply]
Re: Trying to convert date from a line of text by moritz (Cardinal) on Jul 07, 2009 at 20:58 UTC
Instead of re-inventing the wheel, you should take a look at existing wheels, for example Date::Parse - maybe some of them work for you out of the box, or with little effort?	[reply]