RegEx Date Validation - God I Hate This

Thora_Fan

Ok, I hate regular expressions with a white hot passion. Despite this, I am desperatly TRYING to learn them. In my attempt to do so, I am trying to write one to validate a date.

I have a date in the format of mm/dd/yyyy. I want to use this within a preg_match. So I tried what I thought it would be:

preg_match('/[0-9]\/[0-9]\/[0-9]/', $date);

However, this did not work, obviously. Any idea what I am doing wrong?

sarah

If you need to make sure that a) the date is in the correct format and b) the date is legit (no 01-43-2003), try something like this:

<?
$date="mm/dd/yyyy";
$dateArray=explode("/",$date);
if(!checkdate($dateArray[0],$dateArray[1],$dateArray[2])){
	print("ERROR - Incorrect Date");
}else{
	print("Date checks out");
}
?>

seanpaulcail

if (ereg ("([0-9]{4})-([0-9]{1,2})-([0-9]{1,2})", $date, $regs)) {
echo "$regs[3].$regs[2].$regs[1]";
} else {
echo "Invalid date format: $date";
}

Thora_Fan

Thanks for both your replys. Sarah, I had actually thought of that before I posted, but wound up deciding I wanted to do it as a regular expression, simply because, well, I don't know why.