We recently got a nice group scheduling server here at work. I've already written a module that speaks its language, which is working great. Now I'm working on some little tools to show it off. I want to be able to do something like this:

% echo "meetings friends for lunch; today at 1pm" | schedule.pl
[download]

I need to be able to extract the date and time and turn it into an epoch. However, I want it to accept as many different ways of expressing a time as it can, eg:

• 22 Oct, 15:30
• noon tomorrow
• this afternoon at 3
• 10am next tuesday

And so on .. I figure that Date::Parse or similar is going to be involved somewhere, but what else should I be looking at for this sort of thing? Any pointers to this kind of text processing would be appreciated.