I can't beleive I've never come across this one before.
Basically, I'm parsing the text in human-created text documents and one of the fields I need to parse is a date and time. Because I'm in Australia, dates are formatted like dd/mm/yyyy but strtotime only wants to parse it as a US formatted date. Also, exploding by / isn't going to work because, as I mentioned, these documents are hand-typed and some of them take the form of d M yy.
I've tried multiple combinations of setlocale but no matter what I try, the language is always set to US English.
I'm fairly sure setlocale is the key here, but I don't seem to be able to strike upon the right code. Tried these:
- au
- au-en
- en_AU
- australia
- aus
Anything else I can try?
For clarity: I'm running on IIS with a Windows box.
Thanks so much :)
Iain
Example:
$mydatetime = strtotime("9/02/10 2.00PM");
echo date('j F Y H:i', $mydatetime);
Produces
2 September 2010 14:00
I want it to produce:
9 February 2010 14:00
My solution
I'm giving the tick to one of the answers here as it is a much easier-to-read solution to mine, but here's what I've come up with:
$DateTime = "9/02/10 2.00PM";
$USDateTime = preg_replace('%([0-3]?[0-9]{1})\s*?[\./ ]\s*?((?:1[0-2])|0?[0-9])\s*?[./ ]\s*?(\d{4}|\d{2})%', '${2}/${1}/${3}', $DateTime);
echo date('j F Y H:i',strtotime($USDateTime));
Because I can't rely on users to be consistent with their date entry, I've made my regex a bit more complex:
- 0 or 1 digit between 0 and 3
- 1 digit between 0 and 9 -- yes this will match 37 as a valid date but I think the regex is already big enough!
- Could be some whitespace
- Delim