As usual, there's a wide choice of ways to do this ;-) A couple of ways of converting slashes to letters 'q':

Method one: backslash
s/\//q/g

Method two: cool s/// syntax
s|/|q|g
s(/)(q)g
s{/}{q}g
You don't have to use slashes in s/// -- take a look at 'man perlop'.

Update: Are you sure you don't want to take a look at Date::Manip and Date::Format? There's a nice parseDate function in the former ;-)

And one more s/// that probably does exactly what you want, in one pass:
s{(\d\d)/(\d\d)/(\d\d\d\d)\s+(\d\d):(\d\d):(\d\d)}{$1$2$3$4$5$6}

-mk