Formatting php for-loop

Question

So I am new to php and I am writing a script to take a time stamp in the form of "January 23, 2014 at 11:01PM" and break it into a multi-dimensional array with elements for month, date, year, hour, and minutes. Here is my code:

$raw_data= array("January 20, 1993 at 10:20PM", "September 6, 1991 at 6:23PM");
        var_dump($raw_data);
        $num_dates= count($raw_data);

//Step 1: break content into month, day, year, hour, and minutes
    for ($i=0; $i=($num_dates-1); $i++) {   
        $partial_data = implode(preg_split("/[A-Z]{2}/", $raw_data[$i]));
        $broken_data[$i] = preg_split("/[\s,:]/", $partial_data);
        unset($broken_data[$i][2]);
        unset($broken_data[$i][3]);
}

For some reason, when I run this in the terminal it seems to be an infinite loop. I tested the code inside the for-loop on a one-dimensional array, and the output was what I expected, so I am pretty sure my problem is because I don't know how to format a for loop in php. Does anyone see an obvious beginner mistake?

Spencer Wieczorek · Accepted Answer · 2014-10-10 22:14:52Z

1

Because of this: $i=($num_dates-1) You need to check the condition ==, not use an assignment =. Although in this case it appears you want to do something like this: $i <= ($num_dates-1). You may have just forgot to type <.

edited Oct 10, 2014 at 22:14

answered Oct 10, 2014 at 22:09

Spencer Wieczorek

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1 Comment

boulderz Over a year ago

Perfect. I did forget the <. Thank!

Callem Pittard · Accepted Answer · 2014-10-10 22:09:13Z

1

This is assigning a value...

$i=($num_dates-1);

This is comparison and what you need:

$i < $num_dates

answered Oct 10, 2014 at 22:09

Callem Pittard

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Comments

dmertl · Accepted Answer · 2014-10-10 22:12:12Z

1

Not directly answering your question, but there's easier ways to parse the date. You can use strtotime() to go from string to timestamp, then create a DateTime to access date parts using DateTime::format().

http://php.net/manual/en/function.strtotime.php

http://php.net/manual/en/class.datetime.php

http://php.net/manual/en/datetime.format.php

answered Oct 10, 2014 at 22:12

dmertl

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Cheery · Accepted Answer · 2014-10-10 22:22:18Z

0

$broken_data = array();
$raw_data = array("January 20, 1993 at 10:20PM", "September 6, 1991 at 6:23PM");

foreach($raw_data as $date) { 
   if ($d = strtotime(str_replace(' at ', ', ', $date)))  
     $broken_data[] = array(
        date('F', $d), date('j', $d), date('Y', $d), date('G', $d), date('i', $d)
     );
}

var_dump($broken_data);

If the years are above 1901 and below 2038.

edited Oct 10, 2014 at 22:22

answered Oct 10, 2014 at 22:14

Cheery

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