Help with converting data

richburr

Hi,

I've dabbled some but I don't use it very often, so I'm still pretty much a newbie. I have a PHP/MySQL setup I'm working on for tracking some stats. I need to convert some of the data before I display it on the web. I could use help on a few things:

1) I need to convert dates that come out of the MySQL db in the 2003-07-25 style to look like 07/25/2003. I took a look at the date/time stuff in the PHP manual but didn't really figure it out. I'm assigning the date to the variable $date for each row, and I'd like to convert it afterwards to the other format.

2) There is a column in the database where the time is entered in minutes. I need to convert that to hours:minutes, for example converting 143 minutes to 1:23.

3) Last but not least. I have a column that contains numbers with decimals, it's dollar amounts (9.75, -5.25, etc). I'd like to round these to integers.

I'd appreciate any help with this.

Thanks,

Rich

HalfaBee

To convert dates use preg_replace()
www.php.net/preg_replace

$date = preg_replace( "/([0-9]{4})-([0-9][0-9])-([0-9][0-9])/,"\$2/\$3/\$1 , $DB_date );

To convert numbers to minutes
print $minutes/60.':'.$minutes%60;

to round numbers would you beleive you use the round() function
www.php.net/round

HalfaBee

richburr

Thanks a lot for your help, HalfaBee 🙂

Rich

richburr

Ok, just in case someone else runs across this and cares, here's what I ended up with.

That preg_replace example gave a parse error and I couldn't figure out what the problem was, so after checking the examples in the manual I did this:

$pattern = "/([0-9]{4})-([0-9][0-9])-([0-9][0-9])/";
$replacement = "\$2/\$3/\$1";
$date = preg_replace( $pattern, $replacement, $db_date );

Not very different, but it did parse and works fine.

That minutes:hours example was close, but just dividing $minutes/60 didn't work because it didn't always yield an integer.
The output would end up with things like 0.24377:9. So, I tweaked it to this:

$hours = $minutes/60;
$hours = (int) $hours;
$myminutes = $minutes%60;
print "$hours:$myminutes";

That converts 143 minutes to 2:23, which is just what I needed.

And, yes, rounding to an integer for my last question was easy 🙂

$foo = round($foo,0);

Thanks again for the help. The examples and links to the manual were enough to help me get this worked out. This will save me a lot of time.

Rich

HalfaBee

Sorry, I should have put the code in the [ PHP] tags. It would have shown up the problem to start with.

e.g.

$date = preg_replace( "/([0-9]{4})-([0-9][0-9])-([0-9][0-9])/,"\$2/\$3/\$1 , $DB_date ); 

$date = preg_replace( "/([0-9]{4})-([0-9][0-9])-([0-9][0-9])/","\$2/\$3/\$1" , $DB_date );

It shows the string should have been closed.
At least you fixed the problem, it probably gave you more experience than just cutting and pasting would.

HalfaBee