Question

I usually mess this up, but I am trying to get a year from a variable $date = 2011-01-01 I am trying to get 2011 from the variable…I tried this but it didnt echo anything out…

date(strtotime("Y"), strtotime($date));

Answer 1

$year = date('Y', strtotime('2011-01-01'));

Or, if you don’t want to convert to date, and trust your input format:

$year = explode('-', '2011-01-01')[0];

The above requires PHP 5.4, on older versions you need two lines:

$arr = explode('-', '2011-01-01');
$year = $arr[0];

Or yet, this slightly faster alternative suggested by tigrang:

$year = substr($date, 0, 4);

Or, an even faster way, as salathe suggested:

$year = (int) $date;

(everything after the first dash will be ignored, so $year will contain an integer with the year part of the date (unlike the other options, where $year would be a string).