Parse m/d/Y date to assign day, month, year to variable

Question

I'm currently getting the user's birthday from Facebook and storing it in the standard m/d/Y that Facebook supplies (Ex: 05/21/1982). I have an edit profile page in which I need to assign the day, month and year to 3 separate variables in order to allow the user to change his or her birthday as well as pre-select the correct birthday.

My code that pertains to only the days variable which I would want to be assigned to $days_var and in the above example of 05/21/1982 would be 05 is pasted below:

<?php
$days = range(1, 31);
foreach($days as $day) {
?>
<option value="<?php echo($day) ?>" <?php if ($days_var = $day){echo "selected='1'";}?> ><?php echo($day) ?></option>
<?
}
?>

Thanks. EDIT: I have only given the days example but would obviously need the day, month and year variables.

Here is [a relevant read about creating select options from a range of integers](https://stackoverflow.com/a/71790975/2943403). — mickmackusa, May 02 '22 at 03:22

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 13 '12 at 23:44

4

You're needing to parse the date string into its constituent components? How about:

list($month_var, $days_var, $year_var) = explode('/', $dateString);

answered Jun 13 '12 at 23:44

curtisdf

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score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 13 '12 at 23:45

2

See PHP's datetime class or the strtotime() and date() functions

answered Jun 13 '12 at 23:45

Cameron Martin

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score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 13 '12 at 23:51

1

Like ddlshack says, use strtotime() and date(),

And for future references,

It's

if ($days_var == $day)

not

if ($days_var = $day)

answered Jun 13 '12 at 23:51

Hyunmin Kim

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score 0 · Answer 4 · answered May 01 '22 at 22:28

It will be rather poor UX or result in tedious javascripting to provide three separate date component fields. This is because not all month-year combinations have the same number of days.

Instead pass the full date expression to a single html <input type="date" value="$date"> tag.

See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/input/date for more information.

When it comes to presenting a date string to the end user, you are welcome to use any format you like. When transferring the data between layers or pages of your application, standardize the data as Y-m-d -- this will improve processing functionality and codability in javascript, php, and sql.

If you'd rather ignore the good advice above, you can parse your date string with: (Demos)

For potentially zero-padded month and day strings:

sscanf($date, '%[^/]/%[^/]/%s', $m, $d, $y);
[$m, $d, $y] = explode('/', $date);
$dateObject = DateTime::createFromFormat('m/d/Y', $date); then
$m = $dateObject->format('m');
$d = $dateObject->format('d');
$y = $dateObject->format('Y');

For values directly cast as integer types:

sscanf($date, '%d/%d/%d', $m, $d, $y);

Parse m/d/Y date to assign day, month, year to variable

4 Answers4