Help formatting date!

brianb

Hello,

I'm looking for some help formatting the date within some code I'm stripping from a text file...

Basically, the dates in text file are coming through like so: M/D/YYYY

I need them to to be parsed as MM/DD/YYYY

Is there a way to do this simply?

Maybe something like whats below? For some reason I'm getting an UNEXPECTED CHARACTER error with the following code.

$date = date('m-d-Y', strtotime($date));

Gary_King

What's the difference between those two date formats?

Unless you really do mean M/D/YYYY?

So then, November 10th, 1980 would be: 1/0/1980?

Weedpacket

strtotime won't work because the date format is ambiguous (because 10/1/2003 is 10 January, 2003). [man]sscanf[/man] can be used instead.

brianb

Weedpacket...

Thanks for the help...

Is there anyway you could give me some example code of how I would format?

Thanks in advance!

brianb

Hello again....trying to creat a function for my problem....can anyone help me and tell me why it's not working?

function dater()
{
list($month-$day-$year) = sscanf($html_code,"%s-%s-%s");

if ($month < 10) {
$month = "0$month";
}

if ($day < 10) {
$day = "0$day";
}

$html_code = "$month-$day-$year";

return $html_code;
}//end function

Any input is appreciated!

tekky

function dater($old)
{
     if (substr_count($old,"/") == 3)
     {
          list($month, $day, $year) = explode("/", $old);
          if ($month < 10) { $month = "0$month"; }
          if ($day < 10) { $day = "0$day"; }
          return "$month-$day-$year";
     }
     else { return "-1"; } //invalid date sent to function
}

should work fine....

bah, had a nice little paragraph about sscanf, then after reading the docs to verify I didnt miss anything new with it... learned that sscanf() can return arrays too.... :rolleyes: guess I'm behind on using that now :p

back on topic though

list($month-$day-$year) = sscanf($html_code,"%s-%s-%s");

should be:

list($month, $day, $year) = sscanf($html_code,"%s/%s/%s"); 
....//if checks and formatting for leading zeros
return "$month-$day-$year";

note: I changed "%s-%s-%s", replaced the -'s with /'s since you originally said your formats were M/D/YYYY not M-D-YYYY