Personal Finance in perl

In the absense of a teach yersel Ruby or Javascript book, my mission to learn many languages has stalled on perl. So I've got myself a new crazy madcap scheme, I'm going to write myself a Personal Finance Suite.

Sure, it'll be a mammoth task, but I can easily break it down into bitesize chunks. Thusly:-

• Chunk to enter transactions into a log file
• Chunk to calculate current net worth
• Chunk to calculate weekly/month spend in each expenditure category
• Chunk to handle planned/future transactions

And then a neat menu thing.

I shalled call it NinAcounts or maybe NinAccounts.

Anyhoo, I started ploughing through last night, aned have gotten the log file business sorted. I'm just working on some data sanitising routines.

What I'm a little stuck on is where I get user input for the transaction date. I can easily chop up dd/mm/yy, dd-mm-yy or dd/mm/yyyy into the constituent $day, $month and $year scalars or a neat @date array, but to then convert this into a single unixtime number its not working proper.

I want to be able to convert from human dates into unixtime and back again dead easily, but it no working...

Any ideas?
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