CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptregex
vcuankit
vcuankit

Reputation: 817

Regular Expressions: Extract Dates From String

Hopefully this won't be too difficult, but I'm not too skilled in regular expressions. I have a string that contains two dates and would like to extract the two dates into an array or something using JAVASCRIPT.

Here's my string: "I am available Thursday, October 28, 2009 through Saturday, November 7, 2009"

I would like for the array to be: arr[0] = "Thursday, October 28, 2009" arr[1] = "Saturday, November 7, 2009"

Is this even possible to do?

Thanks for all your help!

Upvotes: 0

Views: 534

Answers (3)

Brienne Schroth
Brienne Schroth

Reputation: 2457

"(Sunday|Monday|Tuesday|etc), (January|February|etc) [1-3]?[0-9], [0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]", maybe? Syntax might not be exact for Javascript but that should get the idea across. It would have the potential for false positives (January 39th) but trying to account for complex calendar rules in a regexp is a mistake.

Upvotes: 0

rjmunro
rjmunro

Reputation: 28056

With just regular expressions, you could only really make it work for very specifc date formats. So this will match your exact words:

var s="I am available Thursday, October 28, 2009 through Saturday, November 7, 2009";
arr=s.match(/(?:Mon|Tue|Wed|Thu|Fri|Sat|Sun)[^\d]*\d*, \d*/g);
alert(arr);

But not if someone just typed: "October 28, 2009".

Upvotes: 0

Crescent Fresh
Crescent Fresh

Reputation: 116980

You don't need a regular expression for a (mostly) static string like that. How about:

var s = "I am available Thursday, October 28, 2009 through Saturday, November 7, 2009";
var dates = s.split('available')[1].split('through');
trim(dates[0]); // "Thursday, October 28, 2009"
trim(dates[1]); // "Saturday, November 7, 2009"

trim() strips leading + trailing whitespace:

function trim(str) {
    return str.replace(/^\s\s*/, '').replace(/\s\s*$/, '');
}

Upvotes: 2

Related Questions