Manipulating Dates in PHP without using Regular Expressions

Question

Is there a way to change a date from

1985-12-15

to

1985-12

without using a regular Expression?

Answer 1

<?php echo date('Y-m', strtotime('1985-12-15')); ?>

That should do it.

This will, using strtotime, convert 1985-12-15 to a unix timestamp. The date function then takes a second parameter timestamp on which to format the date.

Answer 2

Convert the date to time via strtotime() then use date() to output in correct date format, like so:

<?php    
echo date("Y-m",strtotime("1985-12-15"));
?>

Answer 3

$myDate = date('Y-m',strtotime('1985-12-15'));
echo $myDate // prints '1985-12'

Answer 4

not best to substr($date,0,strrpos($date,'-')); ?

thatd be cheapest ?

Answer 5

Maybe I'm just stupid, but if you only want the beginning of that date, stored as a string, can't you just use substr to extract the 7 characters at the beginning of that string ?

A bit like this, for instance :

$input = '1985-12-15';

$output = substr($input, 0, 7);
var_dump($output);

Which does give you :

string '1985-12' (length=7)

No need for any date-manipulation related function, in this case -- and this will probably be even faster/cheapier that parsing the string to a date and all that.

(Yeah, I know, premature optimisation ^^ )

Answer 6

If you think a regular expression isn't "cheap", then time functions will almost certainly be even more expensive: you would need to convert the string into a time value, then format it back into a string...

Answer 7

do you have that time value already in a array or do you whant such a like output come from the date function?

Answer 8

If you are not sure how the date will be formated, you should use the strtotime function, otherwise its probably as easy to do if the format is yyyy-mmm-dd or yy-m-d.

$datearray = explode('-',$date);
echo $datearray[0].'-'.$datearray[1];