Interesting post, but I’m not sure I see the usefulness in using regular expressions to parse user friendly dates, when the built in function strtotime is programmed to accept a wide variety of date formats.

Was waiting for someone to mention strtotime() ;) I guess I should have mentioned it.

The main point here was using examples that are easy to follow, so we can focus on the regular expressions and the behaviour of PHP’s preg_* functions.

And strtotime() is sometimes more than you want – do you really want users to be able submit everything strtotime() supports? And sometimes it doesn’t quite support the format you desire e.g. “month/day/year” is common in the US but Europe generally uses “day/month/year”.

Anyway – these blogs will eventually become and article so will make sure to mention it in the re-write.

[code]php> // To get base reading
php> echo strtotime('2006-10-28');
1162008000
php> echo strtotime('28th Oct 2006');
1162008000
php> echo strtotime('Oct 28th 2006');
1162008000
php> echo strtotime('October 28, 2006');
1162008000
php> echo strtotime('10/28/06');
1162008000
php> // and on and on[/code]

who write line breaks with a space in them

That’s a good point. It should probably also use the /i pattern modifier for people using upper case. Wanted to keep the regex short to explain though.

Thanks Kevin – was working for me: hadn’t spotted the problem

The link to Joy of REGEX [3] is broken…

Thanks for this great series.

Thanks, Paul. We don’t know what happened to part 3, but we’ve recreated it from an archived copy. Do let us know if you notice any other missing blog posts! :(Found the problem. The post was accidentally marked as “private”.

I write breaks as <br />

preg_split('#<br/?>#',$comment) could be changed to: preg_split('#<br(?: ?/)?>#',$comment) to accommodate this. Hopefully, this attempt will work. Otherwise I give up!

I would love it if you would get into some of the possibilities of recursive regexs in a future article.

dr livingston.

Thanks for this great series.