CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpstringextractsubstr
Sweepster
Sweepster

Reputation: 1949

PHP Extract part of a string

I know there's a lot of questions about this but it seems there's no simple way to do what I want. Take the following strings as an example:

expires  Friday, December 21, 2012 @ 11:59pm ET
expires  Saturday, December 22, 2012 @ 9:59pm ET

Both strings are similar but the following code is inconsistent:

echo substr($string, 14, 27);

as it outputs the following:

Friday, December 21, 2012 @
Saturday, December 21, 2012

Clearly, I don't want to keep the @ symbol. Is there a way to simply keep the date while removing "expires " and " @ ##:##pm ET"?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 7691

Answers (3)

Explosion Pills
Explosion Pills

Reputation: 191749

preg_replace('/expires\s*(.*?)@/', '\1', $string);

You also don't really need to use a regex, but I would since it looks simpler. Here is a non-regex solution:

//I took 14 from you, but it seems to be 9
substr($string, 14, strpos($string, '@') - strlen($string));

Upvotes: 5

ROY Finley
ROY Finley

Reputation: 1416

I have to format the exact same string on a site i work on. this is what i use. seems to work okay:

 <?PHP

function FormatDate($string)
    {
        $exploded = explode(" ", $string);
        $newstring = $exploded['2']." ".$exploded['3']." ".$exploded['4']." ".$exploded['5'];
        return $newstring;
    }

echo FormatDate('expires  Friday, December 21, 2012 @ 11:59pm ET');

Upvotes: 0

Fels
Fels

Reputation: 1343

You want to look at http://php.net/manual/wn/function.strpos.php

strpos "Find the position of the first occurrence of a substring in a string"

So you want to do something like this:

$string = "expires  Friday, December 21, 2012 @ 11:59pm ET";
$string = str_replace("expires ", "", $string); //remove "expires "
$string = substr($string, 0, strpos($string, "@")-1); // Copy anthing up to the first "@"
echo($string);

Upvotes: 1

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