Regex needed for parsing a date/time string

Question

Can someone provide me with a regex for the following? (Using Javascript)

source string: Jan 2 2010 6:00PM

I want the resulting string to show only the time, as shown below. (example above used)

result string: 6:00 PM

Answer 1

Replace (\d{1,2}:\d{1,2})([AP]M) with \1 \2

Update: Use \d{2} instead of \d{1,2} if the source string is guaranteed to be in the HH:MM format.

Answer 2

You could use SimpleDateFormat with the format MMM dd yyyy HH:mm. Then you can get the time part.

Answer 3

While I haven't looked I'm sure you'll be able to find something that will work for you at the Regex Library website. However I happen to agree with SilentGhost in that it might be easier to just split the string. Just make sure all DateTimes are are in the same format.

Answer 4

Implementing SilentGhost's comment in regex: /([^ ]+)([^ ]{2})$/

This will match the last space-delimited "word", with the first bit in group 1 and the last two chars in group 2. The translation to string operations instead should be straight-forward.

You could also replace the (..) with [AP]M or similar, if desired, and might benefit from a tiny bit of validation if you construct the regex to prevent something like blah blah haha-I-gave-garbage-inputPM, but there are many ways to deal with garbage anyway.

Answer 5

If you need to convert it into a date object, and if you're using Javascript in a web browser, you might want this instead:

new Date('Jan 2 2010 6:00PM'.replace(/(?=[AP]M)/i, ' '));
// Sat Jan 02 2010 18:00:00 GMT-0600 (Central Standard Time)

new Date('Jan 2 2010 6:00PM'.replace(/(?=[AP]M)/i, ' ')).toUTCString();
// Sun, 03 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Mozilla has reference documentation on the Javascript Date object.