Re: Date parsing

glvs@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote: 
I need to split the input data based on lines that start with a valid
date.

  Example:

  Input:

  1/2/03:note 1
  note 2 note 3
  01/2/2004 another note
  note line2
  note line3
  5-03-99 this is a note from 1999

  Output:

  Date: 1/2/03
  note1
  note2 note3

  Date: 01/2/2004
  another note
  note line2
  note line3

  Date: 5-03-99
  this is a note from 1999

This is tricky because dates can be in different formats (1 digit month
instead of 2, for example). Is there any easy way to do this in Perl?

Without a strict definition of a valid date, I can't think of a safe way. This might be something to start with, assuming the input is in $_:

    my ($date, $lastpos);
    while ( /(\d{1,2}([\/-])\d{1,2}\2\d{2,4})./g ) {
        if ($date) {
            print "Date: $date\n";
            print substr($_, $lastpos, pos() -
              $lastpos - 1 - length $1 ), "\n";
        }
        $date = $1;
        $lastpos = pos;
    }
    print "Date: $date\n";
    print substr($_, $lastpos), "\n";

Of course, you may want to further check that respective date is actually a valid date, e.g. that month is one of 1 - 12. But before that you need to decide if month is the first or second number...

--
Gunnar Hjalmarsson
Email: http://www.gunnar.cc/cgi-bin/contact.pl
.