I had a similar problem earlier today. I needed a method to parse human-readable dates that were generated by various systems. I found that the Time-modules, and specifically Time::ParseDate, should be able to convert various date formats to the time in seconds since January 1st, 1970 (the epoch).

This solves the most difficult part of your problem. I'm not sure if there is a module that handles the conversion to MySQL format--in the past I've used localtime to do these types of conversions.