Question

I’m currently working on parsing iCal reminder strings, similar to: -P14DT0H0M0S

Using PHP, how might I be able to parse the elements of the string so that if I had:

<?
 $reminder = "-P14DT0H0M0S"  // somehow output to show "-2 weeks" or eve "-14 days"

             //  OR  //

 $reminder = "-P0DT3H0M0S"  // somehow output to "-3 hours" 

 // etc...

Any help on this would be great. I’m kind of stuck on where to begin.

Many thanks!

Answer 1

I’m not familiar with the format, and there’s almost certainly a library available for this, but it looks like a simple regex would do the job here.

Something like:

$matches = array();
if (preg_match('/^-P(\d+)DT(\d+)H(\d+)M(\d+)S$/', $reminder, $matches))
{
  // matched pattern, elements captured with () will be stored in $matches[1..]
  $days = $matches[1];
  $hours = $matches[2]; 
  $minutes = $matches[3];
  $seconds = $matches[4];
}