Question

so I’ve made a clock-time to seconds function, and it works fine when running on it’s on, with the test string…say 12:53:13 PM.

But when I put it in another script (via require, or just copy-pasting) I’m finding a problem, I’m not sure if it’s specifically due to the function, but this is just weird. The string

“PM” is registering as 6 characters instead of 2 like it should, is what a var_dump says. Any ideas why?

I got the time by exploding an imploding a string of the entire date. This is actually the code

$time = explode(" ",$dateallstr);
$time = array($time[5],$time[6]);
$time = implode(" ",$time);

var_dump($time);
//require("timeinsecs.php");

And this is what var_dump returns

array(4) { [0]=> string(2) "11" [1]=> string(2) "14" [2]=> string(2) "55" [3]=> string(6) "PM" }

This is the starting string.

DATEALLSTR: string(45) "Tuesday 14th of February 2012 11:14:55 PM"

Please help, I have no clue why it would do this.

EDIT:

Ok, got the bin2hex. I’m not sure if this whole thing is just the bin2hex.

BIN2HEX504d3c2f693estring(6) “PM”

Answer 1

The original string has length 41. It looks like somehow your input carries 4 NUL characters after the text which are not printed but do count to the length:

var_dump("Tuesday 14th of February 2012 11:14:55 PM");
 => string(41) "Tuesday 14th of February 2012 11:14:55 PM"

var_dump("Tuesday 14th of February 2012 11:14:55 PM\0\0\0\0");
 => string(45) "Tuesday 14th of February 2012 11:14:55 PM"

You can try to trim() the input before explode(), that should get rid of the extra characters:

$time = explode(" ", trim($dateallstr));

Edit: You’ve skipped the first step of troubleshooting in PHP: viewing the source to see what the web browser doesn’t show. Now that you have posted the hex dump, we see that the last string is actually "PM</i>".