Sorting dates chronologicaly

pablopicasso

hi,

i have a bit on my front page where headlines are gonna be inserted now im just using a flat text file for ease of use and it doesnt have to be secure.... however i need the headlines to be sorted by reverse chronological order (thats from the 1st to 31st for anyone who doesnt know) now i have it kind of working but it will ether sort the date and month but not the year or the year but not the date and month... anyway heres the code im useing:

<?php
function datediff($data, $b) {


$data = date("d m Y",$data);
$b = date('d m Y',$b);

if ($data == $b) $r = 0;
else $r = ($data > $b) ? 1: -1;

return $r;
}
function insertheadline() {
	$file = "../Text/MusicNewHeadlines.txt";
	$data = file($file);
	uksort($data, "datediff");
		foreach ($data as $line){
			$val = explode("|", $line);
			echo '<p>' . $val[0] . ' ' . $val[1] . '</p>';
		}
	}
?>

in my text file my dates are seperated with / so like 10/9/2009 kinda thing but ive tried changing to other things and it doesnt make any difference.....

thanks for any help..

pablo

Merve

Have you looked at [man]mktime/man to get the timestamp for your dates?
HTH,
Merve

pablopicasso

would i still use the same sort function i have now to sort if i did use that???

if not could you show me how or what i would use instead?

LoganK

Mktime will get a timestamp in the seconds from January 1st, 1970. The newer the date, the more seconds since January 1st, 1970. Ergo, once you mktime() all your dates, sort them numerically. The earliest dates chronologically will be the first ones of the sorted array.

Q.E.D.

🙂

Merve

[man]array_sort/man

LoganK

Such simplicity compared to my overwinded-speech...

pablopicasso

this maybe a really thick question so please excuse me but, how do i use the mktime() function to get the unix timestamp.... could you use it in my code as an example please..

thanks.

oh also im assuming it wont affect my final output and that ill still have 10/4/2005 instead of one large interger that is the difference between then and the unix timestamp date?

LoganK

It will affect your final output, but to change that all you have to do is run the timestamp through date().

Mktime is called like this:

mktime ( [int hour [, int minute [, int second [, int month [, int day [, int year [, int is_dst]]]]]]] )

If that's not the format of your dates (or it's too complex), you might want to look at [man]strtotime[/man].

pablopicasso

ok so my dates come from a seperate file so do i use mktime($data) or strtotime($data), and to turn it back i use date($myvariablewiththetimestampin)

LoganK

Like I said previously, the format of mktime() is:

mktime ( [int hour [, int minute [, int second [, int month [, int day [, int year [, int is_dst]]]]]]] )

If your date is not in this format than you'll obviously need to use strototime().

Drakla

Strtotime is quicker than mktime, you'd think it wasn't, but it is - just one of those weird mysteries of php.

LoganK

Hmm...interesting...I would think it'd be slower, because it has to parse the text and recognize it...whatever! If you say it's faster, then it's faster!

pablopicasso

im having problems with using ether i think its cos my text file has more than just dates in it i has a string like 10/4/05 - my bum caught fire...more info. that sorta thing. would this be a problem and could some one please show me how to use the strtotime() or mktime() in some script please cos its getting very agitaing and annoying when you have people shouting at you to get it done... :rolleyes:

thanks.

LoganK

Ahhh...that's going to be a bit more complex. You'll need to (from the looks of it) create a REGEX query only for the data. Now, I suck at REGEX, but it will look something like this:

[0-9]?[0-9]\/[0-9]?[0-9]\/[0-9]?[0-9]

Now I absoulutely suck at REGEX, like I said, so this is almost guaranteed to fail. But at least it point you in the right start, or a senior board member can come in and clean it up.

Merve

You might want to check out something like this (just an example unrelated to your code):

<?php
$date="10/4/05"
$datearray=explode("/", $date);
$date_timestamp=mktime(0, 0, 0, $datearray[1], $datearray[0], $datearray[2]);
?>

You can put something similar to this in a loop and then sort all the timestamps using [man]array_sort/man or [man]arsort/man as needed.

LoganK

Yeah, but he's still gotta filter out the rest of the text from the line.

Merve

Well, he can use a combination of both solutions then. 🙂

pablopicasso

aint got a clue about regex whatever that is but ill have a search around.. or if someone can explain thatd be great(oh and how to use it lol).

to the post above though how would i use that when i have other info in the txt file. how can it identify the date from the headline and the turn it into a timestamp?

LoganK

you can't use just that - you'll need to use a combination, like REGEX and merve's suggestion

pablopicasso

yeah but i dont even know what regex is and ive looked around about it abit but it explains in a way im not sure i understand properly...im really really new to php and the code ive gotten i think is really quite easy compared to what it seems i have to write.....i know i seem like im asking you to write my code but im not i just need to understand it but in laymans terms or even in javascript or actionscript terms as i know them two languages quite well....