Question

The RSS feed I read from was recently updated and messed up quite a few things, I fixed most of the issues but this I can’t figure.

How the date was formatted previously:

<div>
    <div>
        <div>
            13 </div>
    </div>
</div>
<div>
    <div>
        <div>
            July </div>
    </div>
</div>
<div>
    <div>
        <div>
            2012 </div>
    </div>
</div>

How it is right now:

<div>
    <div>
        <div>13th July, 2012</div>
    </div>
</div>

So:

1. Day Month and Year has to be separated in their own DIVs (most difficult)
2. “th” and “,” needs to be removed (this is easy with str_replace)

Now the problem is I could do this with jQuery in minutes but it has to be done with PHP before it gets saved, and since the divs have no class/id its even more difficult for me.

Answer 1

You can use strip_tags in PHP to get the date and then use strtotime to normalize the date.

Then you can generate whatever HTML you want.

EDIT: here is your solution:

<?php
//at this point, $string = the input you wish to modify
$string = "
<div>
    <div>
        <div>13th July, 2012</div>
    </div>
</div>
";

//get normalised time
$time = strtotime(trim(strip_tags($string)));

//with normalised time, generate your new output
echo "
<div>
    <div>
        <div>
            ".date("d",$time)." </div>
    </div>
</div>
<div>
    <div>
        <div>
            ".date("F",$time)." </div>
    </div>
</div>
<div>
    <div>
        <div>
            ".date("Y", $time)." </div>
    </div>
</div>
";
?>