PHP : Better date parser than strtotime

Question

I'm trying to parse a string in a specific format and I'm really surprised to discover that I can't find a good function to do that.

The only one I found is strtotime and it doesn't fit as it guesses the date format. I really don't trust the "guess" part. Moreover my string input is in a french format (dd/mm/aaaa) which it seems that it's not well understood (it parses american formats like mm/dd/aaaa).

What I'm looking for is a function that take in input a date string and a format to parse. I could do it myself with a regexp but I can't believe that it doesn't already exist.

I found :

• DateTime::createFromFormat(). But it only work with PHP 5.3 and I don't have the power to upgrade the PHP version (5.2)
• strptime(). This method does what I want but is not implemented on windows platform (by the way: WTF ??)

Any suggestion ?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, it seems that such parsing is better done manually, by exploding the string at slashes and then switching day and month.

Answer 2

Check out Zend_Date, which lets you specify the format when you set a date. As well as including constants for many common formats, you can specify your own too.

$date = new Zend_Date();
$date->set('27/08/2009','DD/MM/YYYY');

Answer 3

The following comment from php.net on strtotime may help:

Fails for non-US dates where the ordering is uncertain, such as 01/02/2003 - parses this as Feb 1st, rather than Jan 2nd.

If you are parsing dates for a non-US locale, you can flip these elements of your date:

<?php 
$y = $_POST['date']; 
if (preg_match('/^\s*(\d\d?)[^\w](\d\d?)[^\w](\d{1,4}\s*$)/', $y, $match)) { 
  $y = $match[2] . '/' . $match[1] . '/' . $match[3]; 
} 
echo date('d # m # Y', strtotime($y)); 
?>

WARNING: Above only works for dates, and breaks for times: 12:30:01 will be converted to 30/12/01.

Answer 4

If you know your date format input will be English-formatted, then you can process it into a more standard date format. A simple parsing of 24/7/2007 to 2007-07-24 is trivial. Explode with the forward slash and put the parts in the right spot. I know for a fact that strtotime will parse 2007-07-24 correctly.

Answer 5

I've written a class myself, I think you'll find an ok version in gadmdatecommand.php in http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpdbedittk

Regarding the comments here to just explode by '/' and swap the number, its not quite that simple. If you offer to enter dates into an input box, you may get - depending on the locality of the user and the application

1/7/2010 1.7.2010 1-7-2010 15 Jul 1 Jul 2010 1/6/8

and many more variations. I've solved this problem (at least for me successfully) by creating dateformats, each of which have a) a regex that matches the format b) an array mapper that matches regex brackets into date pieces (day, month, minute, am/pm) c) an output format for date()

HTH