Question

I’m trying to grab part of a string that represents a date.

The date-string will usually, but not always, have regular text before and/or after it.

In this example:

Sometimes text is here, Sun, Apr 09, 2000  And sometimes but not always text here

I would want the result to be:

Sun, Apr 09, 2000

Bear in mind that days and month strings can be 3 or 4 characters in length.

My meager attempt is:

$test = "Sometimes text is here, Sun, Apr 09, 2000  And sometimes but not always text here";

if (ereg ("/([a-z]{3,4}),.([a-z]{3,4}).([0-9]{1,2}),.([0-9]{4})/i", $test, $regs)) {
    echo "$regs[4].$regs[3].$regs[2].$regs[1]";
}

Also interested in hearing non-regex based solutions.

Answer 1

This regex seems to work in multiple cases:

$str = "Sometimes text is here, Sun, Apr 09, 2000  And sometimes but not always text here";
$reg = '/(\w{3}),\s*(\w{3})\s*(\d+),\s*(\d{4})/';

$match = preg_match($reg, $str, $matches);

if ($match) {
    $date = "{$matches[2]} {$matches[3]} {$matches[4]}\n";
    // Apr 09 2000
    $timestamp = strtotime($date);
}

ereg() should no longer be used, as of PHP 5.3.0 it is deprecated and preg has long been favored as a faster, more widely used alternative.