Although the solution I was proposing may not be precisely the one you were looking for; I thought it was worth noting for sake of others who might stumble on your post and wonder about alternative ways of doing this. It also appears simpler than the regexp way :)

There should be absolutely no difficulty in getting Date::Manip to work with cqperl as the module "is written entirely in perl" (quote). Despite of the fact that it may increase the size of your final executable and/or also affect it's run-time speed, there is no other visible harm in using the module. As I had stated, it would be an overkill to use the module to simply decypher date and hour values from the sample input you provided. Nontheless, it does appear cleaner than using raw regexp ;)

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