My requirement is parsing xml files which contains wide varieties of timestamps based on the locales at which they are written. They may contain Unicode characters in case of Chinese or Korean locales. I have to parse these timestamps and put then in a standard format something like 2009-11-26 12:40:54 to put them in a oracle database. Sometimes I may not even know the locale and yet I have to parse the timestamps.

I am looking for a module that automatically detects the timestamp format (including unicode characters for am and pm in their local language) and converts in to epoch time so that I can convert it back to what ever way I like to.

I have gone through similar questions in this forum. Few suggested DateFormat module, and Date::Parse module. The perl distribution I am using is 5.10 so Date::Manip doesn't come as a core module. As I am supposed to use just the basic core modules and few CPAN modules(on request I cannot ask for all),

I request you to kindly suggest me a good module that suffices all my requirements. Thanks in advance