[RESOLVED] Rewrite file name 20060506 to May 6, 2006

[jacy]

Greetings,

I have a script that reads the file contents of a directory and displays them as a list of links. All the files are PDFs and follow the naming convention of YYYYMMDD. Rather than display, say, 20060506.pdf in the list, I'd like to rewrite the name to show May 6, 2006. This is way beyond my newbie skills and I haven't been able to find something similar that I can hack to suit.

Can anyone point me to an example or a good reference?

Many thanks,
Jacy

Here's the script:

<?
$the_array = Array();
$handle = opendir('files/.');
while (false !== ($file = readdir($handle))) {
   if ($file != "." && $file != "..") {
   $the_array[] = $file;
   }
}
closedir($handle);
rsort ($the_array);
reset ($the_array);
while (list ($key, $val) = each ($the_array)) {
   echo "<li><a href=index.php?id=$val>$val</a></li>";
}
?>

[bradgrafelman]

Copule of things.... this:

while (list ($key, $val) = each ($the_array)) {
   echo "<li><a href=index.php?id=$val>$val</a></li>";
}

could more easily be written as this:

foreach($the_array as $val) {
   echo "<li><a href=index.php?id=$val>$val</a></li>";
}

As for your date format question, you can use [man]strtotime/man to convert the string into a Unix timestamp, and then use the [man]date/man function to format it to your liking.

[jacy]

Thanks for the little clean-up tip 🙂 and for the strto pointer -- that was very helpful.

Amazingly enough I managed to get this working, but I've thrown off my sort now It's sorting by the converted file name, as it properly should, but that's not what I want. I need it to sort by date (the unconverted file name) in descending order. I believe I need to do the sorting of the array earlier, everything I've tried so far messes things up pretty nicely.

It also seems very slow to me... http://stjuliana.org/bulletin/index-test.php

Thanks,
~Jacy

<?php
$the_array = Array();
$handle = opendir('files/.');
while (false !== ($file = readdir($handle))) {
   if ($file != "." && $file != "..") {
		$filesplit = explode(".", $file);
   		$timestamp = strtotime($filesplit[0]);
		$list = date('F j, Y',$timestamp);
		$the_array[] = $list;
   }
}
closedir($handle);
sort ($the_array);
reset ($the_array);
foreach($the_array as $val) { 
	echo "<li><a href=index.php?id=$val>$val</a></li>"; 
} 
?>

[bradgrafelman]

What I meant was for you to simply change the second $val in your echo() statement. I didn't want to spoonfeed you code, but since you managed to work out the formatting, here's what I meant...

<?PHP
// leave the beginning of the script like you had before - get an array of filenames

foreach($the_array as $val) { // this is the part you should change:
	$filesplit = explode('.', $val);
   	$timestamp = strtotime($filesplit[0]);
	$list = date('F j, Y',$timestamp);
	echo "<li><a href=index.php?id=$val>$list</a></li>";
}

EDIT: Also, it didn't seem slow at all for me. Is it the script that's running slow, or your internet connection? You can time the execution of a script (or even just part of a script) like so:

$arr = explode(' ', microtime());
$starttime = $arr[1] + $arr[0];

// your script here

$arr = explode(' ', microtime());
$endtime = $arr[1] + $arr[0];
echo ( 'Page loaded in <b>'.number_format(($endtime - $starttime), 7).'</b> seconds.<br />' );

[jacy]

Beautiful, thanks much.

I'd debated whether to post in the Newbie forum and probably should have!

~Jacy

Edit: It really does not seem slow now. Perhaps it was during all my lousy testing. Either that or one of my kids had 9 AIM windows firing at the same time.