Question

so i have an array with months:

$arr_month = array(
    1=>'january',
    2=>'february',
    3=>'march',
    4=>'april',
    5=>'may',
    6=>'june',
    7=>'july',
    8=>'august',
    9=>'september',
    10=>'october',
    11=>'november',
    12=>'december'
);

i also have strings (i know, they look weird…) that look like:

23 de january del 2003
12 de may de 1976
6 de february de 1987

What i want is to find and match the month in the string with the array and return the array key.

so:

23 de january del 2003 returns 1
12 de may de 1976 returns 5
6 de february de 1987 returns 2

and so on…

Any idea how?

Answer 1

This should work for you.

$dateString = "23 de january del 2003"; // as an example
$exploded = explode (" ", $dateString); // separate the string into an array of words
$month = $exploded[2]; // we want the 3rd word in the array;
$key = array_search ($month, $arr_month); // lets find the needle in the haystack
print $key;

yields 1.

See http://php.net/manual/en/function.array-search.php for more.