How to Parse an RFC 822 style date with Time::Piece?

[jaldhar]

I'm using the excellent Time::Piece module and it is working well for me except for one thing. I need to parse an RFC 822 style Date with strptime. What I want is something like:

$date = Time::Piece->strptime($msg->date, "%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z");

but apparently %z is a GNUism and not supported by the module. So is there an alternate format string I can use instead? Or if worst comes to worst, is there another module that can convert an RFC 822 date into a comparable quantity?

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