Question

I would like to check if a URL (or any string) contains any form of the following pattern ####-##-##

Does anyone have a handy str_replace() or regular expression to do that?

something like:

contains_date_string($string);

returns true if $string contains ####-##-##

Thank you!!!

Answer 1

if (preg_match('/\b\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2}\b/', $str)) {
    // ...
}

If the word boundary (\b) doesn’t do the trick, you could try negative lookbehind and lookaheads:

if (preg_match('/(?<!\d)\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2}(?!\d)/', $str)) {
    // ...
}

As an additional validation, you could use checkdate() to weed out invalid dates such as 9999-02-31 as mentioned in this answer.