Given the following strings:
- 01/01/11
- 1/1/11
- 1/1/2011
- 01/1/2011
- 1-1-2011
- etc
How do I convert these to a Unix timestamp. Note that in most cases, this will be in the format of dd mm yyyy with various delimiters.
asked Jun 28, 2011 at 2:44
StackOverflowNewbie
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3 Answers
Look at strtotime, strptime or the DateTime class.
strtotime Example:
$timestamp = strtotime('1/1/2011');
Each function has it's caveat. For instance, the documentation for strtotime states that:
Dates in the m/d/y or d-m-y formats are disambiguated by looking at the separator between the various components: if the separator is a slash (/), then the American m/d/y is assumed; whereas if the separator is a dash (-) or a dot (.), then the European d-m-y format is assumed.
You could also use preg_match to capture all 3 parts and create your own timestamp using mktime.
preg_match Example:
if ( preg_match('/^(?P<day>\d+)[-\/](?P<month>\d+)[-\/](?P<year>\d+)$/', '1/1/2011', $matches) )
{
$timestamp = mktime(0, 0, 0, ( $matches['month'] - 1 ), $matches['day'], $matches['year']);
}
2 Comments
StackOverflowNewbie
your regex assumes dd-mm-yyyy format, which I am not sure it is.
Francois Deschenes
@StackOverflowNewbie - Your question said: "Note that in most cases, this will be in the format of dd mm yyyy with various delimiters." so I went with that format but you could add
elseif statements to the original one that check for different formats and make the regex more specific (i.e. instead of \d+ use a pattern that describes 0-12 for the month and 0-31 for the days). Of course, in the case of 1/2/13, it's impossible to tell which is which unless you know the format.$to='23.1.2014-18:16:35'
list($part1,$part2) = explode('-', $to);
list($day, $month, $year) = explode('.', $part1);
list($hours, $minutes,$seconds) = explode(':', $part2);
$timeto = mktime($hours, $minutes, $seconds, $month, $day, $year);
echo $timeto;
Comments
You're probably looking for strtotime function.
However just as a caution it will convert each and every possible string format to a unix timestamp (epoch) since it is very difficult to unambiguously parse each and every string to date-time.
