Question

Taking user input such as “tomorrow”, “in three days”, “3 months 30 days”, “march 30, 2011” and interpreting it into a timestamp usable by php.

I feel like I’ve seen something like this before in a task management system. I’d like to use it for something a little different but I can’t find anything precooked anywhere. Maybe I saw it on Remember the Milk? (It’s down as I’m writing this)

Does anyone know of something like this? (preferably php)

Answer 1

Take a look at strtotime:

<?php
$now = time();
printf("%20s : %s\n", 'now', date('Y-m-d H:i:s', $now));

foreach( array("tomorrow", "+ 3 days","3 months 30 days","march 30, 2011") as $userinput ) {
  $ts = strtotime($userinput, $now);
  printf("%20s : %s\n", $userinput, date('Y-m-d H:i:s', $ts));
}

prints

             now : 2010-08-08 09:44:49
        tomorrow : 2010-08-09 00:00:00
        + 3 days : 2010-08-11 09:44:49
3 months 30 days : 2010-12-08 09:44:49
  march 30, 2011 : 2011-03-30 00:00:00