Just a small remark to add to the above. In consecutive lines (stripping out comments) you have the following:

$date = lc ($date);
if ($date =~ /^\[a-zA-Z]{3}\s\d\s\d{4}$/){
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Since you put the string $date into lower case in the first of these lines, you don't need to check for [A-Z]in the second...

dave