Question

I have a set of date strings in the following format:

$date = 'month_name DD, YYYY';

What I would like to do is shorten the month name to 3 characters and remove the year from the end like this:

$output = 'June 10, 2012';
print $output // Outputs 'Jun 10';

So far I have the following, but have not been able to find a method to shorten the first word:

print substr($date, 0, strrpos($date, ',')); // Outputs 'June 10';

Any help would be appreciated!

Answer 1

Use PHP’s DateTime class:

$string = 'June 10, 2012';
$date = DateTime::createFromFormat('F d, Y', $string, new DateTimeZone('America/New_York'));
echo $date->format('M d'); // Output: Jun 10

This is a very stable way to convert times between different formats.

Demo