Thanks to anyone that helped me with this question!
I was able to convert the string 199812312230 to 12/31/1998/22/30 using the script below. 
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Time::Local;
use Date::Manip qw(ParseDate UnixDate);



while (<IN>) {
    $date = ParseDate($_);
 
    if (!$date) {
        warn "Bad date string: $_\n";
        next;
    } else {
        ($year, $month, $day, $hour, $min ) = UnixDate($date, "%Y", "%
+m", "%d", "%H", "%M");
        print "Date was $month/$day/$year/$hour/$min\n";
    }
}

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In reply to changing a string to a useable date time by cpiety

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