PHP DateTime Regex

Question

Hey, long story short I have inherited some terrible code. As a result a string comparison is buggy when comparing dates due to the format of the date. I am trying to convert the date to a valid DateFormat syntax so I can run a proper comparison.

These are some samples of the current format:

12/01/10 at 8:00PM

12/31/10 at 12:00PM

12/10/09 at 5:00AM

and so forth. I'd like to convert this to a YYYYMMDDHHMM format i.e 201012012000 for comparison purposes. If anyone can give me a quick regex snippet to do this that'd be appreciated as right now i'm hitting a brick wall for a regex. I can do it by exploding the string over several times etc but I'd rather do it in a more efficient manner.

Thanks!

A regex will not replace 8...PM with 20. Not a good idea. I'm sure there's a php date parser you can use. — Kobi
– Kobi, Commented May 11, 2010 at 14:34
If you strip out the "at" text, this appears to go through strtotime just fine. — ceejayoz
– ceejayoz, Commented May 11, 2010 at 14:47

Community · Accepted Answer · 2023-11-17 20:42:18Z

3

Working with dates in strange formats is very easy with the DateTime class which was built into PHP 5.3.

No need for regex or anything fancy:

$date = DateTime::createFromFormat('m/d/y \a\t g:iA', '12/10/09 at 5:00AM');
print_r($date);

Once it is a date object you can have it in any format you want.

edited Nov 17, 2023 at 20:42

CommunityBot

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answered May 11, 2010 at 14:38

tplaner

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1 Comment

salathe Over a year ago

Note that the DateTime class has been around since PHP 5.2.0, however DateTime::createFromFormat was indeed introduced with 5.3.0.

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