I have become quite happy with the Date::Manip library after reading the Perl Cookbook. I have found it slow for repetitive parsing, but it can make things very easy if you are constatly wanting odd dates using todays date as a basis.

ParseDate can take an 'english like' string and then output that date in its own format of YYYYMMDDHH:MM:SS

UnixDate is another function that converts ParseDate's output to a customisable format, similar to localtime as shown above, it lets you output things in a more customisable format if that is of any concern. 

use Date::Manip qw(ParseDate UnixDate);

#examples giving epoch seconds
$date = ParseDate("last month");
$date = ParseDate("yesterday");
$date = ParseDate("250 days ago");
$date = ParseDate("2nd tuesday in april");

#date formating example
$date = UnixDate($date, "%d-%m-%Y");
...
...

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In reply to Re: date by ryan
in thread Yesterday's or last month's date? by renpai

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