How to do a regex replacement, adding characters in a date string?

Question

For PHP

I have a date I want line wrapped.

I have $date = '2008-09-28 9:19 pm'; I need the first space replaced with a br to become

2008-09-28<br>9:19 pm

If it wasn't for that second space before PM, I would just str_replace() it.

Answer 1

s/ /<br\/>/ should do it. Though PHP regex might be greedy and replace all spaces.

edit

I support Ben Hoffstein's PHP solution. Where possible, avoid regex as it nearly always has unintended side effects.

Answer 2

$date = '2008-09-28 9:19 pm';
$result = preg_replace('/(\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2}) (.*)/', '$1<br>$2', $date);

Answer 3

$date = preg_replace('/ /', '<br>', $date, 1);

Answer 4

If you want a regex to match the pattern and return both parts, you can use the following. However, considering all that you're doing is replacing only 1 space, try the str_replace_once that I'll suggest after the regex. Regex is for complicated parsing instead of a wasteful use like replacing one space (no offense intended).

Please note that the following is browser-code, so don't attempt to use it verbatim. Just in case of a typo.

$regex = '/([\d]{4}-[\d]{2}-[\d]{2}) ([\d]{1,2}:[\d]{2} (am|pm))/';
$match = preg_match($regex, '2008-09-28 9:19 pm');
print $match[1];  // Returns 2008-09-28
print $match[2];  // Returns 9:19 pm

// Or replace:
preg_replace($regex, '$1<br>$2', $date);

I suggest the following, much faster mechanism. See this post for the function str_replace_once().

str_replace_once(' ', '<br>', $date);

Answer 5

The other way to do this, which is faster but a bit more code, is

$date = substr($date, 0, 10) . '<br>' . substr($date, 11);