PHP explode by date while keeping delimitter - php

Question

My string looks like this 05/21/2018 ghijkl 06/12/2018 mnopqrst
I need to extract all the values after each date and include the date. I tried
explode('/2018', $string);
But that splits up the date and is also not future-proof. I'm thinking there must be a way to include the delimiter in the element. Perhaps there is also a regular expression I should be using to find the date?
Thank you.

Answer 1

You could use preg_split with the PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE and the PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY flags to keep the delimiter and remove the empty values from the resulting array.
You might use a pattern that matches a date format \b\d{1,2}/\d{1,2}/\d{4}\b (Note that it matches your date format in the example data and does not validate a date itself)
For example:
$str = '05/21/2018 ghijkl 06/12/2018 mnopqrst';
$result = preg_split('#(\b\d{1,2}/\d{1,2}/\d{4}\b)#', $str, -1, PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE | PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);
var_dump($result);
Demo
To validate a date you could use DateTime and perhaps specify your format using createFromFormat.
$date = DateTime::createFromFormat("m/d/Y", '05/21/2018');

Answer 2

You can use current(explode('/', $string));

Answer 3

You can do something like this
$str = '05/21/2018 ghijkl 10/12/2017 mnopqrst';
$arr = explode(' ',$str);
$new = array();
for($i=0;$i<count($arr);$i+=2){
$new[] = ["date"=>$arr[$i],"value"=>$arr[$i+1]];
}
print_r($new);
Live Demo
Output:
Array
(
[0] => Array
(
[date] => 05/21/2018
[value] => ghijkl
)
[1] => Array
(
[date] => 10/12/2017
[value] => mnopqrst
)
)

Answer 4

Assuming your date is guaranteed to be formatted as you mentioned (if it's user input data, it's generally not safe to assume that), you could use a regular expression to find strings after a date:
Using a PHP regex split with the below expression:
/([0-9]{1,2}\/[0-9]{1,2}\/[0-9]{2,4})([a-zA-Z\s]+)/g
Will break 05/21/2018 ghijkl 10/12/2017 mnopqrst into an array with the different groups. Depending how you actually want the output data, you can capture the date and subsequent string in one match group.
Sample code:
$string = '05/21/2018 ghijkl 10/12/2017 mnopqrst';
preg_split('/([0-9]{1,2}\/[0-9]{1,2}\/[0-9]{2,4})([a-zA-Z\s]+)/g', $string, $stringParts);
array (
0 => '05/21/2018',
1 => 'ghijkl',
2 => '10/12/2017',
3 => 'mnopqrst'
);
https://regex101.com/r/gPXkDz/2

Answer 5

You could do that using regular expressions. Here's an example code:
<?php
$string = '05/21/2018 ghijkl 06/12/2018 mnopqrst';
$matches = [];
if (preg_match_all('#(\d{2}\/\d{2}\/\d{4})#i', $string, $matches) > 0) {
echo "Found the following dates: \n";
foreach ($matches[0] as $date) {
printf("- %s\n", $date);
}
}
This would result in the following output:
Found the following dates:
- 05/21/2018
- 06/12/2018