Data parsing Q

Anon

Hello to all you PHP gurus!

I'm working on a problem that requires me to format a date in the correct fashion - I have to instances:

Instance 1:

2001-05-23 22:35:99

I have to change that into:

MAY-23-01

(there is no timestamp in the final output)
(keep in mind that the 2001 could be 1999 - so what i'm trying to do is truncate the first 2 digits & leave myself with the 2 far right digits.

Instance 2:

March 13 12:33:33 2001

Has to be changed into:

MARCH-13-01

Notice that that "March" has been converted to all CAPS.

If anyone could help me with this - it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for your time.

Take Care!

-Carl Casale

Anon

Get the 6th and 7th character of the string then pass it to the "date()" function passing "F" as a parameter, it will return the corresponding month in words from the integer you passed it. From there concatenate the 9th and 10th character, afterwards the 3rd and 4th character.
It's the same with your previous problem, only this time you must explode(" ", $STRING) your string into an array then use the strtoupper() function to convert all the characters to upper case of your array[0].

mithril

Carl,

Assuming that the 2 formats you mention in your post are the only ones you need to parse, and the date to format is stored in $date, the following code should do the trick:

  if (preg_match("/(\d{4}[-]\d{2}[-]\d{2}) /", $date)) {

    $tmp = explode(" ", $date);
    $date = explode("-", $tmp[0]);
    echo "Formated date: <b>" . strtoupper(date("F-d-y", mktime(0, 0, 0, $date[1], $date[2], $date[0]))) . "</b>";
  }

  else if (preg_match("/(\D*[ ]\d{2}) /", $date)) {

    $tmp = explode(" ", $date);
    echo "Formated date: <b>" . strtoupper($tmp[0]) . "-" . $tmp[1] . "-" . substr($tmp[3], 2) . "</b>";
  }

  else {
    echo "I don't know how to parse dates in the format: $date🙁";
  }

HTH.

geoff

Anon

Thank you Eloy & Geoff for your input - I'll play with that - I didn't know I could use the date function with these formats - so these dates are in standard formats I guess?

One quick Q though - is it nessessary to use the date function - or could I have made an array in the nature of $months=array(01=>"JAN",02=>"FEB"...so on) and just use that to substitute the correctly formated month - or is there a reason to be using the date function?

-Thanks for the help, highly appreciated!

Take Care

-Carl

mithril

Carl,

I'd say that "YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS" is a standard date format, but not the second example.

What's actually happening in the examples I gave you is the hours, minutes, and seconds are being parsed out of the date strings and being passed into mktime() to create the Unix timestamp for that date. The date() function then converts the timestamp to whatever format you specify..... "F-d-y" in this case. As long as you can separate out the hours, minutes, and seconds to pass to mktime(), that method with date() will work.

You could do it with an array such as that, but why bother when the date() function exists? That's the beauty about having all these nice functions built into the language core🙂 Besides, the using array would require unnecessary memory allocation to create the variable. Mind you, you're not saving much memory, and PHP is so fast that it doesn't really matter, but optimizing your memory usage is a Good Thing (TM).

geoff