Question

I have a very large txt file javascript array – too big for me to go and edit each entry separately. It looks like this:

["12/1/2011 00:00",15848],["12/1/2011 01:00",15108],["12/1/2011 02:00",14643],["12/1/2011 03:00",14265], &c.

How can I pass this file through PHP to change all the dates and write a new file? I’m thinking I need to use strptime() or strtotime() but I’m not sure how to proceed.

The date format is Month/Day/Year.

EDIT: I ended up recreating the array from a CSV file. Here’s the code I used in case anyone’s interested. Thanks for the help.

$handle = fopen("stuff.csv", "r");

while(($data = fgetcsv($handle, ",")) !== FALSE) {
    echo "[" . strtotime($data[0]) . ", " . $data[1] . "],<br />";
}

Answer 1

Match all the dates in the string with a regular expression, then use strtotime() on the results:

$str = '["12/1/2011 00:00",15848],["12/1/2011 01:00",15108],["12/1/2011 02:00",14643],["12/1/2011 03:00",14265]';
$p = '#(\d+/\d+/\d{4}\s\d{2}:\d{2})#';
preg_match_all($p, $str, $matches);

foreach ($matches[1] as $m) {
  echo strtotime($m) . "\n";
}

---

UPDATE: Just realized you said your data is in a javascript array. You can handle this easily in JS as well:

var new_times = [];
var times = [["12/1/2011 00:00",15848],["12/1/2011 01:00",15108],["12/1/2011 02:00",14643],["12/1/2011 03:00",14265]];

for(i=0; i < times.length; i++) {
  var d = new Date(times[i][0]);
  var new_arr = [(d.getTime() / 1000), times[i][1]];
  new_times.push(new_arr);
}