Thread: PHP Snippet Share: Regex & Explode

Hello, I was just playing around with some database display information. I have a variable that I should tell you what they are first.

-- The $e[array] is an events database call
-- The others are pretty explanatory.

Anyways I wanted to take a DATE TIME entry in the database. It looks like so YEAR/MO/DA 08:08:00 PM. I wanted this to do different things, and figured you could make some use of it. I plan to make this more efficiant with time, but pretty simply does what I needed for the time being.

I wanted YEAR-MO-DA 08:08:00 PM to first of all, leave out the time. So let's count how many chars are in YEAR/MO/DA

Y1-E2-A3-R4-|-5|-M6-07-|-8|-D9-A10 .. 10 characters in the 'needed' string. So let's limit the length of $datestart and $dateend.

PHP Code:

$datestart = substr($e['datestart'], 0, 10); // Show only the date
$dateend   = substr($e['dateend'], 0, 10);  // Show only the date 


substr does all the work there..

Now, it's showing the date only. I needed it to remove the -'s so I did... and replaced them with /.

PHP Code:

  $reg_ex = "\-";  // Look for what?
  $replace_word = "/"; // Replace with what?

  $datestart = ereg_replace($reg_ex, $replace_word, $datestart); 
  $dateend = ereg_replace($reg_ex, $replace_word, $dateend); 


Now that I have replaced the dashes with slashes I needed to completely chang the format of YEAR/MO/DA to MO/DA/YEAR so let's go ahead and use explode to do that.

PHP Code:

   $datestart_pieces = explode("/", $datestart);
    $year   =  $datestart_pieces[0]; 
    $month = $datestart_pieces[1];
    $day    = $datestart_pieces[2];
       $datestart = $month.'/'.$day.'/'.$year;

   $dateend_pieces = explode("/", $datestart);
    $year   =  $dateend_pieces[0]; 
    $month = $dateend_pieces[1];
    $day    = $dateend_pieces[2];
        $dateend = $month.'/'.$day.'/'.$year; 


Then call show what we've done.

PHP Code:

 echo $datestart.' - '.$dateend; 


This all looks like this.

PHP Code:

$datestart = substr($e['datestart'], 0, 10); // Show only the date
$dateend   = substr($e['dateend'], 0, 10);  // Show only the date

$reg_ex = "\-";  // Look for what?
$replace_word = "/"; // Replace with what?

  $datestart = ereg_replace($reg_ex, $replace_word, $datestart); 
  $dateend = ereg_replace($reg_ex, $replace_word, $dateend);

   $datestart_pieces = explode("/", $datestart);
    $year   =  $datestart_pieces[0]; 
    $month = $datestart_pieces[1];
    $day    = $datestart_pieces[2];
       $datestart = $month.'/'.$day.'/'.$year;

   $dateend_pieces = explode("/", $dateend);
    $year   =  $dateend_pieces[0]; 
    $month = $dateend_pieces[1];
    $day    = $dateend_pieces[2];
        $dateend = $month.'/'.$day.'/'.$year;
        
        echo $datestart.' - '.$dateend; 


Enjoy!

EpiphanySales added 11 Minutes and 11 Seconds later...

Ha. Was just notified by someone else that it can be more efficiantly this way. Glad I am so ignorant.

PHP Code:

$dates = explode('-', $datestart);
$newdatestart = "$dates[1]/$dates[2]/$dates[0]";