The secret of dealing with dates in Perl is to convert your value into an "epoch seconds" value. You can do that using timelocal from Time::Local. In your case, it would be done like this (assuming your data line is in $_):

use Time::Local;
# get date and time
my ($date, $time) = (split /\|/)[4, 5];
# get dmy
my ($d,$m,$y) = split /\//, $date;
# get hours & mins
my ($hr, $min) = split /:/, $time;
# convert year and month into 'correct' forms
$y -= 1900;
--$m;

# get epoch (use 0 for seconds)
my $epoch = timelocal(0, $min, $hr, $d, $m, $y);
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The easiest way to get formatted dates from epoch seconds is to use POSIX::strftime, like this:

use POSIX 'strftime';
my $fmt_date = strftime('%Y-%m-%d', localtime($epoch));
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Please don't use Date::Manip unless you can't find any other way to do what you want. It's a huge inefficient module and using it will really slow your script down.

--
<http://www.dave.org.uk>

Perl Training in the UK <http://www.iterative-software.com>