Good work, it's been a pleasure seeing you develop this. Now the assignment is in, I'll show you how I'd do it. The basic principle I'll use is to get the input into some fixed order as soon as possible.

You could simplify it a bit by making split more ambitious, splitting on either whitespace or '/', my @dateparts = split '/|\s+', $date; Now decide if we have a named month second (08 Apr 1984), and reorder if so, @dateparts[0,1] = @dateparts[1,0] if $dateparts[1] =~ /^[A-Z]/; Lets collect the year logic in one place,

$dateparts[2] += ($dateparts[2] > 99) ? 0 :
                     ($dateparts[2] > 9) ? 1900 : 2000;
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print $months{$dateparts[0]},
      ' ',
      0+$dateparts[1],
      ', ',
      dateparts[2];
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# input:
chomp(my $date = <>);
# parse, return numeric year,month,day or empty list on error
if (my ($y,$m,$d) = split_date($date)) {
  # print out in Month dd yy format
  print "Date is: ", format_date($y,$m,$d), "\n";
} else {
  print "invalid date: $date; please try again\n";
}
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Update: make comment agree with code re: order of returned values; said parsing but meant conversion

I think the biggest thing I would have approached differently (other than using a CPAN module to do date work)

I think we are heading into the part of the class where we can do just that...gotta get that foundation stuff outta the way tho

is to divide the problem into parts and have code to perform each part.

Yea - I recognize that I did this script in a sort of "conversant" style (or some other word that makes more sense) in order to help me understand how to make it work. I'm just now starting to get more comfortable with dividing things into discrete functions, and subroutines. Now I just have to put that more into practice.

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use warnings;

# $time = str2time($date);
my @date = ( 'Apr 8 1984',
             'apr 08 84',
             '4/8/84',
             '04/08/84',
             '08 Apr 1984',
             'April 8 1984',
             '8 april 1984');

my @months = qw/ January February March
                 April May June July August
                 September October November
                 December /;

# build month name lookup hash
my %months = map {
                   ($months[$_] => $_,
                    substr($months[$_], 0, 3) => $_)
                } 0..9;


foreach (@date) {
    my ($year, $month, $day) = parse_date($_);
    printf "%s %d %d\n", $months[$month], $day, $year;
}

sub parse_date
{
    my $date_str = shift;
    my ($year, $month, $day);

    if ($date_str =~ /\//) {
        # validate date string
        die "Invalid date format"
            if $date_str !~ /[\/0..9]/;

        # in mm/dd/[cc]yy format
        ($month, $day, $year) = split /\//, $date_str;

        # normalization
        $year = normalize_year($year);
        $month -= 1;  # zero based month, get rid of leading 0
        $day += 0;    # get rid of leading 0
    } else {
        # in alpha month, numeric day format
        ($month, $day, $year) = split /\s+/, $date_str;

        # normalization
        $year = normalize_year($year);
        ($month, $day) = ($day, $month) if $month =~ /\d/;
        $day += 0;

        $month = ucfirst $month;
        die "Invalid month" if !exists $months{$month};
        $month = $months{$month};
    }
    
    return ($year, $month, $day);
}

sub normalize_year
{
    my $year = shift;
    return length($year) == 2 ?
                $year > 30 ? $year + 1900 : $year + 2000 :
                $year;
}
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April 8 1984
April 8 1984
April 8 1984
April 8 1984
April 8 1984
April 8 1984
April 8 1984
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#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use warnings;
use Date::Parse;

# date strings in various format
my @date = ( 'Apr 8 1984',
             'Apr 08 84',
             '4/8/84',
             '04/08/84',
             '08 Apr 1984' );

my @months = qw/ January February March April May June July
                 August September October November December /;

foreach (@date) {
    my ($day,$month,$year) = (strptime $_)[3,4,5];
    printf "%s %d %d\n", $months[$month], $day, $year + 1900;
}
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April 8 1984
April 8 1984
April 8 1984
April 8 1984
April 8 1984
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Ah, yes...I am really looking forward to being allowed to use modules in this class!!! Thanks for the code, btw.