Newbie string question

Anon

I have a string "20:45:00" and I'm wanting to turn it into "8:45 pm".

1) What is the command that will help me find what the nth character in this string is?

2) Is there an eiser way to do this?

Thanks

lucianoes

    Where does that string come from? You can have time automatically displayed and formatted any way you want, you know that? If it is a text string, here is a poor excuse for a workaround using 'explode()':

<?php
$time = explode(":", $string); // *1
$hour = $time[0];
$minute = $time[1];
$second = $time[2];

if ($hour=='0') || ($hour=='00')
{$hour='12'; $ampm='am';} // 2
elseif ($hour=='12')
{$ampm='pm';} // 3
endif;

if ($hour > 12)
{$hour=$hour-=12; $ampm='pm';} // 4
else {$ampm='am';} // 5

print "$hour:$minute $ampm";
?>

Comments:
1 // use ":" as the separator. $var now is an array containing 3 elements: (20,45,00). Each element is assigned a variable with an obvious name.
2 // if $hour='0' or '00', it's morning.
3 // if $hour='12', it's some time after noon.
4 // if $hour is greater than 12, subtract 12 hours and make it "pm".
*4 // if $hour is less than 12 ("equal" has been ruled out before), no need to change the value of $hours. Just make it "am".

    I'm a newbie too and I didn't test the code, so watch out for possible mistakes.

    HTH,
    Luciano ES
    Santos - SP - Brasil

lucianoes

    Ooops! Where I wrote "$var now is an array", please read "$time now is an array".

    Luciano ES
    Santos - SP - Brasil

mithril

A much simpler way to do it is to use PHP's native Date/Time functions. For example:

  <?php

    $str= "2001-01-01 20:45:00";
    $tmp = explode(" ", $str);
    $time = explode(":", $tmp[1]);
    $date = explode("-", $tmp[0]);

    echo "The time and date is: ".date("g:i a, l, F d, Y", mktime($time[0], $time[1], $time[0], $date[1], $date[2], $date[0]));
  ?>

will print "The time and date is: 8:45 pm, Monday, January 01, 2001". More info on the Date Time functions can be found in the manual at:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.datetime.php

HTH.

geoff

mithril

Just to add a little bit of explanation about my previous example, mktime() creates a Unix timestamp for a given date and time which date() then formats to display in whatever format you choose. mktime() requires a value for hour, minute, second, month, day, and year in that order to create the timestamp. If you are dealing with a string which only contains a time (ie. 20:45:00), you can specify any valid date (greater than Jan. 01, 1970) to fulfill mktime()'s requirements.

Perhaps a better example would have been:

  <?php

    $str = "20:45:00";
    list($hour, $min, $sec) = explode(":", $str);

    echo date("g:i a", mktime($hour, $min, $sec, 1, 1, 1970);

geoff

[deleted]

If this isn't the shortest version I'll eat my lunch:

$sTime = '21:03:13';
echo date('g:i a', strtotime($sTime));

mithril

Yup, I think you won in the concise code contest🙂

-geoff

[deleted]

yes Yes YES!!

yahooo! Iiiii aaam the chaaaampiooon! :-)

Anon

What are you so happy about? It IS the shortest version, so you DON'T get to eat your lunch. :-)

[deleted]

...you haven't seen the kind of lunch they serve here... 🙂