Question

I am parsing some data on a website using PHP and it gives me the amount of time in this format:

P16DT1H58M47S

But they don’t always have the number of days, like so:

PT8H10M3S

And sometimes no hours:

PT33M57S

What I need to find is a way to convert that to a total number of seconds. I do NOT need to put that into a date object, but I would like to find a fairly quick way to do this as I have a lot of data to go through.

Answer 1

http://www.php.net/manual/en/dateinterval.construct.php

Interval specification.

The format starts with the letter P, for "period."  
Each duration period is represented by an integer value  
followed by a period designator.  
If the duration contains time elements,  
that portion of the specification is preceded by the letter T.

--------------
Y   years
M   months
D   days
W   weeks. These get converted into days, so can not be combined with D.
H   hours
M   minutes
S   seconds

P16DT1H58M47S = 16 days, 1 hour, 58 minute and 47 seconds