Question

I have a number of exported text fields from an old access database that are being ported over into a new MySQL structure. There are various field inputs in the format:

10/06/2010 09:10:40 Work not yet started

I would like to take that string and use some sort of regular expression to extract the date/time information and then the comment afterwards.

Is there a simple regular expression syntax for matching this information?

Answer 1

I think I’ll have a go a this

preg_match('|^([0-9]{2})/([0-9]{2})/([0-9]{4})\s([0-9]{2}):([0-9]{2}):([0-9]{2})\s(.*)$|',$str,$matches);
list($str,$d,$m,$y,$h,$m,$s,$comment)=$matches;

you then have the necessary values to reconstruct the time in any format you wish.