Ron Rosenfeld wrote...
....
I wondered about your ...|Dec)\S* in favor of ...|Dec)[a-z]* as a valid month
name should only have letters following.

Consider 1st Dec. 2008. Sometimes abbreviations include terminating
periods. If I were going to be really fastidious,

(Jan(uary|\.)?|Feb(ruary|\.)?| . . . |Dec(ember|\.)?)

And also, given how years are usually expressed, I'd prefer: * (\d{2}|\d{4})

Believe it'd be more efficient to express that as (\d{2}){1,2}.