Convert date and time to Unix timestamp

[NZ_Kiwis]

HOw can I convert say "24Oct3PM" to a unix time stamp? like 15156156211 or whatever it should be?

[NogDog]

[man]strtotime/man would make it simple if your date/time string were in any of the formats that it recognizes, but a non-standard format like "24Oct3PM" would require parsing the various parts, then either building them into a string that strtotime() can parse or else into number that can be used in [man]mktime/man. Also, you'll have to figure out what year to use, too, since it's not part of your string.

[bretticus]

Wow, that's a crazy date format, probably easiest to use a regular expression to isolate each part and then call strtotime() on the result.

Perhaps something like:

<?php
$date = '24Oct3PM';
preg_match('/^([0-9]{1,2})([a-z]{3})([0-9]{1,2})([APM]{2})$/i', $date, $matches);
list(,$day,$month,$time,$meridiem) = $matches;
$unix_time = strtotime("$month $day 2008 $time $meridiem");
?>

[Weedpacket]

Hey, it's just "digits, letters, digits, letters". [man]sscanf[/man].... (and where is this data coming from? 1974?!)