Question

I am trying to parse user-entered string dates with PHP. I need to remove all characters other than these two acceptable categories:

1) [0-9,\./-] (numerals, comma, period, slash, and dash)
2) An array of acceptable words:
    $monthNames=array(
        "january"=>1,
        "jan"=>1,
        "february"=>2,
        "feb"=>2
    );

I tried explode()ing on character word bounaries and then removing each section that is not in the array, but that led to quite a mess. Is there an elegant way of accomplishing this?

Thanks!

Answer 1

You could use strtotime()

echo strtotime("now"), "\n";
echo strtotime("10 September 2000"), "\n";
echo strtotime("+1 day"), "\n";
echo strtotime("+1 week"), "\n";
echo strtotime("+1 week 2 days 4 hours 2 seconds"), "\n";
echo strtotime("next Thursday"), "\n";
echo strtotime("last Monday"), "\n";

To check for failure:

$str = 'Not Good';

// previous to PHP 5.1.0 you would compare with -1, instead of false
if (($timestamp = strtotime($str)) === false) {
    echo "The string ($str) is bogus";
} else {
    echo "$str == " . date('l dS \o\f F Y h:i:s A', $timestamp);
}

See http://php.net/manual/en/function.strtotime.php

Also DateTime::createFromFormat() might be useful.

See http://www.php.net/manual/en/datetime.createfromformat.php