How can I extract times of different formats from Perl strings?

Question

I receive e-mails at least once a day with price changes. I am attempting to automate the recording of the data. I am fairly new to regex and now more confused than I was 5 hours ago.

Here are some sample lines to parse. Note that the time format is not always the same:

Effective 00:01AM, 10/13/10, PRICES WILL BE AS FOLLOWS UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED  
Effective 00:01 AM, 10/13/10, PRICES WILL BE AS FOLLOWS UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED

Looking to get time and date into a variable for manipulation later in the script prior to being inserted into a database.

Answer 1

/(\d{2}:\d{2}[A-Z]{2}), (\d{2}\/\d{2}\/\d{2})/

Captures 00:01AM and 10/13/10 from the example line you posted.

Answer 2

use strict;
use Date::Parse;

for my $line (@lines) {
    if ($line =~ /Effective (.+?) PRICES/) {
        my ($sec, $min, $hr, $day, $mon, $year) = strptime($1);
        $mon += 1;
        $year += 2000;
        # now you can use $year, $mon, $day, $hr, $min
    }
}