You can rearrange strings with substrings and concatenation to put them both in yyyy/mm/dd format, and then they'll compare correctly.
But it would be a lot more educational to figure out the Date approach. Hang in there until you make this work just so you can say you know Date. See if upper case MM helps in your
pattern. Lower case mm is minutes. Once you get parsing working, you can use one date format to parse and another to format back to string. Something along the lines ...
And just for grins, I have a string function based on REXX: translate(input,outtable,intable). For each character of the input, if that character is found in InTable, it is replaced with the corresponding character from OutTable. The conventional use is:
See what this alternative usage does:
And it was about 100x faster than the Date technique last time I checked.