PHP Extract part of a string

Question

I know there's a lot of questions about this but it seems there's no simple way to do what I want. Take the following strings as an example:

expires  Friday, December 21, 2012 @ 11:59pm ET
expires  Saturday, December 22, 2012 @ 9:59pm ET

Both strings are similar but the following code is inconsistent:

echo substr($string, 14, 27);

as it outputs the following:

Friday, December 21, 2012 @
Saturday, December 21, 2012

Clearly, I don't want to keep the @ symbol. Is there a way to simply keep the date while removing "expires " and " @ ##:##pm ET"?

have you tried replacing the expires with an empty string and putting it through strtotime? — Toby Allen
– Toby Allen, Commented Dec 21, 2012 at 23:25

Explosion Pills · Accepted Answer · 2012-12-21 23:36:18Z

5

preg_replace('/expires\s*(.*?)@/', '\1', $string);

You also don't really need to use a regex, but I would since it looks simpler. Here is a non-regex solution:

//I took 14 from you, but it seems to be 9
substr($string, 14, strpos($string, '@') - strlen($string));

edited Dec 21, 2012 at 23:36

answered Dec 21, 2012 at 22:55

Explosion Pills

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1 Comment

Sweepster Over a year ago

Thank you. Yeah, I have to put 14 because somehow the space turns into nbsp in the browser when I make it 9.

Fels · Accepted Answer · 2012-12-21 23:14:39Z

1

You want to look at http://php.net/manual/wn/function.strpos.php

strpos "Find the position of the first occurrence of a substring in a string"

So you want to do something like this:

$string = "expires  Friday, December 21, 2012 @ 11:59pm ET";
$string = str_replace("expires ", "", $string); //remove "expires "
$string = substr($string, 0, strpos($string, "@")-1); // Copy anthing up to the first "@"
echo($string);

answered Dec 21, 2012 at 23:14

Fels

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Comments

ROY Finley · Accepted Answer · 2012-12-21 23:18:17Z

0

I have to format the exact same string on a site i work on. this is what i use. seems to work okay:

 <?PHP

function FormatDate($string)
    {
        $exploded = explode(" ", $string);
        $newstring = $exploded['2']." ".$exploded['3']." ".$exploded['4']." ".$exploded['5'];
        return $newstring;
    }

echo FormatDate('expires  Friday, December 21, 2012 @ 11:59pm ET');

answered Dec 21, 2012 at 23:18

ROY Finley

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