PHP Convert Full Date To Short Date - php

Question

I need a PHP script to loop through all .html files in a directory and in each one find the first instance of a long date (i.e. August 25th, 2014) and then adds a tag with that date in short format (i.e. <p class="date">08/25/14</p>).
Has anyone done something like this before? I'm guessing you'd explode the string and use a complex case statement to convert the month names and days to regular numbers and then implode using /.
But I'm having trouble figuring out the regular expression to use for finding the first long date.
Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

Here's how I'd do it in semi-pseudo-code...
Loop through all the files using whatever floats your boat (glob() is an obvious choice)
Load the HTML file into a DOMDocument, eg
$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTMLFile($filePath);
Get the body text as a string
$body = $doc->getElementsByTagName('body');
$bodyText = $body->item(0)->textContent; // assuming there's at least one body tag
Find your date string via this regex
preg_match('/(January|February|March|April|May|June|July|August|September|October|November|December) \d{1,2}(st|nd|rd|th)?, \d{4}/', $bodyText, $matches);
Load this into a DateTime object and produce a short date string
$dt = DateTime::createFromFormat('F jS, Y', $matches[0]);
$shortDate = $dt->format('m/d/y');
Create a <p> DOMElement with the $shortDate text content, insert it into the DOMDocument where you want and write back to the file using $doc->saveHTMLFile($filePath)

Answer 2

I incorporated the helpful response above into what I already had and it seems to work. I'm sure it's far from ideal but it still serves my purpose. Maybe it might be helpful to others:
<?php
$dir = "archive";
$a = scandir($dir);
$a = array_diff($a, array(".", ".."));
foreach ($a as $value) {
echo '</br>File name is: ' . $value . "<br><br>";
$contents = file_get_contents("archive/".$value);
if (preg_match('/(January|February|March|April|May|June|July|August|September|October|November|December) \d{1,2}(st|nd|rd|th)?, \d{4}/', $contents, $matches)) {
echo 'the date found is: ' . $matches[0] . "<br><br>";
$dt = DateTime::createFromFormat('F jS, Y', $matches[0]);
$shortDate = $dt->format('m/d/y');
$dateTag = "\n" . '<p class="date">' . $shortDate . '</p>';
$filename ="archive/".$value;
$file = fopen($filename, "a+");
fwrite($file, $dateTag);
fclose($file);
echo 'Date tag added<br><br>';
} else {
echo "ERROR: No date found<br><br>";
}
}
?>
The code assumes the files to modify are in a directory called "archive" that resides in the same directory as the script.
Needed the two different preg_match lines because I found out some dates are listed with the ordinal suffix (i.e. August 24th, 2005) and some are not (i.e. August 24, 2005). Couldn't quite puzzle out exactly how to get a single preg_match that handles both.
EDIT: replaced double preg_match with single one using \d{1,2}(st|nd|rd|th)? as suggested.