Regular Expression for matching a date

[josephgigi]

I have the following VB code snippet which tried to extract the date. But it returns only 7/30/20 instead of 7/30/2002. I am having trouble in figuring out why it is not returning the correct date. And it works correctly if I remove ([\s.\w]*) from the pattern. But I need them to further extract the time and AM or PM which can be optional in strContent.
I appreciate the help and thanks in advance.

Imports System.IO
Imports System.Text
Imports System.Text.RegularExpressions

Sub Main()
Module Module1
dim strContent as string = "Scheduling Conference set for 7/30/2002 at 11:00 AM judge"
dim sPattern as string= "(?<FirstDate>(\d{1,2}[/-]\d{1,2}/-?\d\d))([\s.\w]*)"

Dim mx As Match = MatchStringForLastMatch(strContent, sPattern)
MsgBox(mx.Groups("FirstDate").Value)

End sub

Function MatchStringForLastMatch(ByRef sString As String, ByVal PatternString As String) As Match
'Returns the last match and the match Index
Dim DigitRegex As Regex = New Regex(PatternString, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase Or RegexOptions.Compiled Or RegexOptions.RightToLeft)

    Dim Mx As Match = DigitRegex.Match(sString) 
    If Not DigitRegex Is Nothing Then DigitRegex = Nothing 
    Return Mx 
End Function 

'---------------------
End Module

[ednark]

your regular expression works fine when used in php to parse the example string given.. so if you were converting your file to php it would work fine... however php does not support the grouping tag syntax like <?<group_name>(regex))

so i don't think your problem is with your regular expression but with how VB does your regular expression, and i don't htink you will be able to find much on a PHP board..