If you are like me and cannot come up with a clever single regex pattern
that satifies all the possible patterns you can resort to
something like I did for finding various dates in a text file.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $lineN = 1;

while(<DATA>){ 
    for my $dateFormat ( qw ( 
        \D\(\d\d\/\d\d\/\d\d\)\D
        \D\(\d\d\/\d\d\/\d\d\d\d\)\D
        \D\(\d\d\d\d/\d\d\/\d\d\)\D
        \D\(\d\d\d\d-\d\d-\d\d\)\D
        \D\(\d\d-\d\d-\d\d\)\D
        \D\(\d\d-\d\d-\d\d\d\d\)\D
        ^\(\d\d\/\d\d\/\d\d\)\D
        ^\(\d\d\/\d\d\/\d\d\d\d\)\D
        ^\(\d\d\d\d/\d\d\/\d\d\)\D
        ^\(\d\d\d\d-\d\d-\d\d\)\D
        ^\(\d\d-\d\d-\d\d\)\D
        ^\(\d\d-\d\d-\d\d\d\d\)\D
        \D\(\d\d\/\d\d\/\d\d\)$
        \D\(\d\d\/\d\d\/\d\d\d\d\)$
        \D\(\d\d\d\d/\d\d\/\d\d\)$
        \D\(\d\d\d\d-\d\d-\d\d\)$
        \D\(\d\d-\d\d-\d\d\)$
        \D\(\d\d-\d\d-\d\d\d\d\)$
    ) ) {
        my @dates = ( /$dateFormat/g);
        for ( my $i=0; $i<=$#dates; $i++ ) {
            my $date     = $dates[$i];
            print "Found $date on line $lineN\n";
        }
    }
    $lineN++;
}
__DATA__
On 11/11/02 I sent a email and it didn't get there until 11/15/2002
Sometime there is no date.
But then again there one date like 12/31/99 on the line
and this 123/12/2002 is not a date. 
maybe 
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