You don't seem to understand what GrandFather's code is doing. In particular, this chunk of code determines how the original line of text is divided into tag-able pieces:

    my ($bibData, $quote, $primary, $sec) = /
        ^([^"]* "[^"]+"[^"]*)
        ([^\@]+)
        \@([^%]+)
        \%(.*)
        /x;
[download]

That's a regex, expressed on multiple lines (thanks to the "x" modifier at the end), where the first line captures everything up through the first close-quote up to the second open-quote, and the second line captures everything from that point up to the first "@" (keyword symbol).

To get the date as a separate item, you just need to divide up the match a little differently, like this:

    my ($bibData, $date, $quote, $primary, $sec) = /
        ^([^"]* "[^"]+".*?)
        (\d{4})\.\s+
        ([^\@]+)
        \@([^%]+)
        \%(.*)
        /x;

    $xml->startTag('entry');
    $xml->dataElement(bib     => $bibData);
    $xml->dataElement(date    => $date);
    $xml->dataElement(quote   => $quote);
    $xml->dataElement(primary => $primary);
    $xml->dataElement(sec     => $sec);
    $xml->endTag();
[download]

Note how the first capture changed: it now ends with .*? to do a "non-greedy" match of any character until the next capture match is found, which is the one I added to look for 4 digits followed by a literal period and whitespace (updated to require at least one whitespace character). Then we also have to add a $date variable to the list of assignments, as well as a the $xml->dataElement() call to include the $date value in the output.

Bear in mind that if your input ever includes a line of text like this, the method above will do the wrong thing:

"Big Brother."  Review of Orwell's Novel 1984.  Nov. 2011.  "Tough sit
+uation." @tricky %unparsable.
[download]

That could be "fixed" by making the regex match more explicit -- e.g. looking for any of the 12 month abbreviations before the 4-digit year -- but then some entries might lack a month, or the month will be unabbreviated or misspelled...

Any attempt to impose structure like this on plain text has a non-zero probability of failing, because it's impossible to anticipate all the unexpected variations that eventually show up in (human-authored) plain text.

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