Question

What I have:
a string that says “Tue Aug 7, 2012 to Tue Aug 28, 2012”

What I want:
a string that says “Aug 7 – Aug 28”

The only catch is sometimes I have this as a string:

“Fri Aug 31, 2012 7:30pm to 9:30pm”

and I would need this as a result:
“Aug 31”

This is info that is coming from a Google calendar feed, so the incoming string is different based on whether user has put in start time, etc. Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

You can use the preg_match_all function to make the logic easier:

$str1 = "Tue Aug 7, 2012 to Tue Aug 28, 2012";
$str2 = "Fri Aug 31, 2012 7:30pm to 9:30pm";

$pattern = '/(Jan|Feb|Mar|Apr|May|Jun|Jul|Aug|Sep|Oct|Nov|Dec) \d+/';
$numMatches = preg_match_all($pattern, $str1, $dates);

if ($numMatches == 1) // case 2
    echo $dates[0][0];
else // case 1
    echo $dates[0][0]." - ".$dates[0][1];

DEMO (change $str1 to $str2 in preg_match_all to test case 2)

This will work whenever there are one or more dates with the format MON D or MON DD in your string. It doesn’t matter how the rest of the string is formatted, only that the month and day exist.