Question

I want a regular expression to use in preg_match to check whether or not a date is in the pattern DD/MM/YYYY. I tried the code below, but it didn’t work:

preg_match("#^[1-31]*1[1-12]*1[1950-2013]?#", $date);

Answer 1

You could use preg_match("/^\d{1,2}\/\d{1,2}\/\d{4}/",$date); however a regex isn’t well-suited for this task because there you will still need to perform additional validation (“9999” is a valid year, for example). I think instead you may want to take a look at date_parse_from_format(), like:

date_parse_from_format('d/M/Y', $date);

See Convert String To date in PHP for more information.