[RESOLVED] string wildcards

jacksonpt

I have a web form which has a field for users to enter a time. I need to have control over the format of the time, but for a few reasons, I can't give the user a dropdown box to pick from - they have to enter the time in a free form text box.

Is it possible to use wildcards for this? Basically, I want to convert all variations of 10 a.m. to exactly that, 10 a.m. Is it possible to keep it simple with something like this:

$SessionTime = $_GET['SessionTime'];
     if ($SessionTime == "10*") {
          $SessionTime == "10 a.m.";
     }

Something like this would take all variations of 10 a.m. (10 am, 10am, 10 a.m, 10 am., 10 a,m. etc.) and convert them to 10 a.m.

Or do I need to get into regular expressions and pattern matching? I started reading a bit on regular expressions and that stuff just looks way more complicated than what is necessary for this.

devinemke

depending on what exactly the user enters you may be able to use [man]strtotime[/man]. for example these all output "10:00 am"

echo date('h:i a', strtotime('10am')) . '<br>';
echo date('h:i a', strtotime('10 am')) . '<br>';
echo date('h:i a', strtotime('10 a.m.')) . '<br>';

jacksonpt

The user should only be entering one of two values - either 10 a.m. or 1 p.m. The problem is that people don't always use the periods, spacing changes, sometimes it's 10:00 am, etc.

I'm going to try this...

$SessionTime = $_GET['SessionTime'];
  if (strpos($SessionTime, 10)) {
     $SessionTime = "10 a.m.";
  } else if (strpos($SessionTime, 1)) {
     $SessionTime = "1 p.m.";
  } else {
     // leave $SessionTime as is for manual review
  }

jacksonpt

ok... after some playing around this is what ended up working.

  $SessionTime = $_GET['SessionTime'];
  if (strpos($SessionTime, "a")) {
     $SessionTime = "10 a.m.";
  } else if (strpos($SessionTime, "p")) {
     $SessionTime = "1 p.m.";
  } else {
     // leave $SessionTime unchanged, will review manually
  }

I couldn't get the pattern matching to differentiate between the 10 and the 1 in the times, so I ended up basing the matching on the a and the p in am and pm.