How to convert "Day, dd Month yyyy" to "yyyy-mm-dd" in php

Question

How can I convert this:

Thursday, 14 August 2014

to this in php:

2014-08-14

I tried strtotime(), trim(), etc.. and realised thats not it. Can you guide me on this one please?

@Daan: your solution does not work! See answer from Alex. The output will be "14141414-0808-1414" — Sebastian Brosch, Aug 15 '14 at 12:12
@Daan, that's close but not correct - try using date('Y-m-d', strtotime($olddate)); - this is of course assuming the input is a valid date. make sure that you check that first - strtotime($olddate) will return boolean false if date is not valid and you'll wind up with 1969-12-31 — Samuel Fullman, Aug 15 '14 at 12:12
@SamuelFullman You're right, I read the title from the TS and just typed it in. — Daan, Aug 15 '14 at 12:13

score 7 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 15 '14 at 12:10

7

It works just fine for me with strtotime.

$time = strtotime("Thursday, 14 August 2014");
echo date("Y-m-d",$time);

answered Aug 15 '14 at 12:10

Alex

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Thats perfect. That worked! Thankx Alex – Neel Aug 15 '14 at 12:13
I commented elsewhere but be sure and check your date for valid i.e. if(strtotime($olddate)===false /*boolean if not valid*/){ //you cannot do the conversion! } – Samuel Fullman Aug 15 '14 at 12:15

Gianluca Ghettini · Accepted Answer · 2014-08-15T12:21:14.057

if you're facing the problem of converting a human readable date to numeric values you have to reconsider your design. Your code should work only with 32 or 64 bit epoch values (seconds since 1st January 1970) and then convert them into the appropriate format only when needed.

In any case, just do this:

$time = strtotime(stripslashes("Thursday, 14 August 2014"));
echo date("Y-m-d",$time);

remember to strip out slashes and commas because they can confuse strtotime

I would avoid such a solution because it's NOT portable. You'll find PHP versions in which such solution doesn't work, moreover slightly different input strings could make strtotime to fail and most of all -> locale matters!!!! (i.e. what if the string is in italian language???)

Just work with epoch values and make a conversion only to show them to the end user! :-)

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 15 '14 at 12:17

First convert Convert the string to time using strtotime() and than use date() function in php to do this. this function formats a local date and time, and returns the formatted date string.

Your code should look like this

<?php
$orignaltime = strtotime("Thursday, 14 August 2014");
echo date("Y-m-d",$orignaltime);

How to convert "Day, dd Month yyyy" to "yyyy-mm-dd" in php

3 Answers3

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