Parsing dates with inconsistent formats in PHP - php

Question

I have two queries, both related to dates.
1) I have dates in these formats, which I'm looking to normalise into the same format before saving into a database:
Saturday 26 July
Monday 28 - Wednesday 30 July
July 24th, 2014
Thu 4 Sep
Thu 28 Aug — Fri 19 Sep
24-07-2014
Single days are quite easy to work out using strtotime(), but ranges of dates are a bit more tricky.
This, for example, doesn't work:
$dateString = "Monday 28 - Wednesday 30 July";
if (strpos($dateString, "-")) {
$datePieces = explode("-", $dateString);
$startDate = strtotime($datePieces[0]);
$endDate = strtotime($datePieces[1]);
} else {
$startDate = strtotime($dateString);
$endDate = strtotime($dateString);
}
echo '<pre>';
echo date('d F Y', $startDate);
echo '<br/>';
echo date('d F Y', $endDate);
Because the month is only on one side of the explode(), doing it this way returns:
01 January 1970
30 July 2014
2) I need a way of working out what year the date is (it will always be in the future). Something along the lines of:
if (the month in the date string has elapsed) {
the year of the date is this year + 1
}

Answer 1

As long as each source provides you with a consistent format you can use DateTime() and DateTime::createFromFormat() to process the dates for you.
//Saturday 26 July
$date = DateTime::createFromFormat('l j F', 'Saturday 26 July');
//July 24th, 2014
$date = new DateTime('July 24th, 2014');
//Thu 4 Sep
$date = DateTime::createFromFormat('D j M', 'Thu 4 Sep');
//Thu 28 Aug — Fri 19 Sep
list($start, $end) = explode(' - ', 'Thu 28 Aug — Fri 19 Sep');
$start = DateTime::createFromFormat('D j M', $start);
$end = DateTime::createFromFormat('D j M', $end);
//24-07-2014
$date = new DateTime('24-07-2014');
I'm going to leave handling Monday 28 - Wednesday 30 July to you since you'll need to do a little more work to get the month from the second date and apply it to the first. But this should show you how to go about this.