Development PHP: extract set of numbers from a string

OK so basically I have a string which represents a date but the formatting is non-uniform (i.e. it could be '2000', '12th January 1999', '01-01-2000', etc. (The year will always be a 4 digit number though)) So I need to extract just the year from this string in PHP. Clearly a regex is needed but tbh I've only ever used them very briefly in the past so a nudge in the right direction would be appreciated

 

You could do this

$test = explode("-",$string_u_want_to_get);
$year = $test[2];

 

Use 'strtotime' to parse the number in whatever format, to turn it into an integer timestamp. Then you can use 'date' to extract the token you need. e.g.

PHP:

$fuzzyDate = "12th Jan 1999"
$timestamp = strtotime($fuzzyDate);

$year = date("Y", $timestamp);         // Will be "1999"
$month = date("m", $timestamp);        // ..."01"
$dayOfWeek = date("l", $timestamp);    // ..."Tuesday"


Have fun!

 

PHP:

$str_date = "12th August 2007";
$matches = array();
if (preg_match('/(\d{4})/', $str_date, $matches)) {
    $year = $matches[1];
}
print_r((int)$year);


 

Wicked, last 2 work great, thanks dudes

mutznuts, that would only work if the date was 'xx-xx-xxxx' which (as in my first post), that is not always going to be the case.

 

Apologies, didn't read it quite right