Converting string to time in PHP

Question

I am having some trouble trying to convert string to time.

My Code is:

$time = strtotime("14 November, 2013 2:30 AM");
echo $time ."<br />";
echo date("m/d/Y", $time);

I know that strtotime is not magic, and I checked out the acceptable date/time formats but I am not sure how to convert the string to another string without converting it to time first.

What's the easiest way to accomplish this?

Use regular expressions to rewrite your input date string into an acceptable date/time format before using `strtotime`. — Zack Zatkin-Gold, Nov 05 '13 at 23:29
what you're doing is the reliable, correct way. to skip the convert-to-UTC step would require doing string manipulation, which will break eventually under some circumstance. — Kristian, Nov 05 '13 at 23:29
@Kristian Can you elaborate just a little. What do you mean by `the convert to UTC step`? — I wrestled a bear once., Nov 05 '13 at 23:34
`strtotime` returns a UTC. UTC is an integer which is the base unit for most other time functions in PHP. so, typically you want to start with a UTC when doing formatting. in your first step, you get the UTC. then your next step is that you reformat that UTC into a different string format. It is my opinion that in PHP this is the reliable way to do what you're doing. — Kristian, Nov 05 '13 at 23:36

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 05 '13 at 23:32

4

Take a look at DateTime::createFromFormat and then call format on the created DateTime instance.

Something like:

$yourTimeString = '14 November, 2013 2:30 AM';
$date = DateTime::createFromFormat('d F, Y h:i A', $yourTimeString);
echo $date->format('m/d/Y');

answered Nov 05 '13 at 23:32

Marques

116
4

+1, this should be accepted answer, not bunch of `list`, `explode`, `str_replace` etc. functions. http://stackoverflow.com/a/18762582/67332 – Glavić Nov 06 '13 at 06:52

Zack Zatkin-Gold · Accepted Answer · 2013-11-07T06:22:43.603

0

One way is to rewrite the string using explode and list.

<?php
// here we assume "day month, year time AMPM"
$date = "14 November, 2013 2:30 AM";

// assign a variable to each part of the string
list($day,$month,$year,$time,$ampm) = explode(" ",$date);

// remove the commas at the end of the month
$month = str_replace(',','',$month);

// Now we rewrite the strtotime string
$time = strtotime($month . " " . $day . ", " . $year . " " . $time . " " . $ampm);

echo $time ."<br />";
echo date("m/d/Y", $time);

edited Nov 07 '13 at 06:22

answered Nov 05 '13 at 23:32

Zack Zatkin-Gold

814
9
29

missing a param in str_replace, but other than that this worked great for me since I am using an older version of PHP. – I wrestled a bear once. Nov 06 '13 at 00:46

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 27 '18 at 11:11

Php date() function allow natural language string for parsing date,

for Ex:

echo date("d-M-Y", strtotime("first monday of 2019-07")); // returns first monday of july 2019

echo date("d-M-Y", strtotime("last sat of July 2008"));

You can find here php instructions to parsing date as natural languages.

http://php.net/manual/en/datetime.formats.relative.php

Converting string to time in PHP

3 Answers3