Parsing dates with inconsistent formats in PHP

Question

I have two queries, both related to dates.

1) I have dates in these formats, which I'm looking to normalise into the same format before saving into a database:

Saturday 26 July
Monday 28 - Wednesday 30 July
July 24th, 2014
Thu 4 Sep
Thu 28 Aug — Fri 19 Sep
24-07-2014

Single days are quite easy to work out using strtotime(), but ranges of dates are a bit more tricky.

This, for example, doesn't work:

$dateString = "Monday 28 - Wednesday 30 July";

if (strpos($dateString, "-")) {
    $datePieces = explode("-", $dateString);
    $startDate = strtotime($datePieces[0]);
    $endDate = strtotime($datePieces[1]);
} else {
    $startDate = strtotime($dateString);
    $endDate = strtotime($dateString);
}

echo '<pre>';
echo date('d F Y', $startDate);
echo '<br/>';
echo date('d F Y', $endDate);

Because the month is only on one side of the explode(), doing it this way returns:

01 January 1970
30 July 2014

2) I need a way of working out what year the date is (it will always be in the future). Something along the lines of:

if (the month in the date string has elapsed) {
    the year of the date is this year + 1
}

If you are going to get very inconsistent and non-standard formats you will have an impossible job ahead of you. You can work with dates in any format in PHP, but you must know the format to be able to do that. Will you know the format when processing the string? — John Conde
– John Conde, Commented Jul 24, 2014 at 14:26
The date strings are coming from a range of places - mainly from APIs provided by arts and cultural venues plus a dash of web scraping where no API is available. Each API / website does use it's own format consistently - the problem is that data is coming in from lots of different places. — Joseph Valentine
– Joseph Valentine, Commented Jul 24, 2014 at 14:30
But each place uses a consistent format? If so, you can handle this for sure. If you confirm I can show you how to do it. — John Conde
– John Conde, Commented Jul 24, 2014 at 14:31

John Conde · Accepted Answer · 2014-07-24 14:49:17Z

3

As long as each source provides you with a consistent format you can use DateTime() and DateTime::createFromFormat() to process the dates for you.

//Saturday 26 July
$date = DateTime::createFromFormat('l j F', 'Saturday 26 July');

//July 24th, 2014
$date = new DateTime('July 24th, 2014');

//Thu 4 Sep
$date = DateTime::createFromFormat('D j M', 'Thu 4 Sep');

//Thu 28 Aug — Fri 19 Sep
list($start, $end) = explode(' - ', 'Thu 28 Aug — Fri 19 Sep');
$start = DateTime::createFromFormat('D j M', $start);
$end   = DateTime::createFromFormat('D j M', $end);

//24-07-2014
$date = new DateTime('24-07-2014');

I'm going to leave handling Monday 28 - Wednesday 30 July to you since you'll need to do a little more work to get the month from the second date and apply it to the first. But this should show you how to go about this.

answered Jul 24, 2014 at 14:49

John Conde

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1 Comment

Joseph Valentine Over a year ago

That's great - thank you John! Looks like I could very easily use this as part of the API / website scraping so that everything is consistent before it goes into the database. Guessing something along the lines of strrchr("Monday 28 - Wednesday 30 July", " ") would work for the range of dates where the month is only mentioned once.

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