Scan long string for any potential dates [closed] - php

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I have a string which is saved into a database on form process.
I want to create a script which scans the string for any potential dates.
For example:
"The client told us to ring him back this Saturday" "The patient has
an appointment scheduled for 10/10/2013" "Call him back at the end of
the month"
If any of these cases are found, a prompt should appear asking if we would like to create a reminder for that specific date.

Answer 1

PHP has a strtotime function, that can read dates like "this Saturday", and the usual 4/5/2014. You can use a regular expression, like this, to pull out the simple dates:
\d+\/\d+\/\d+ # e.g., 10/10/2012
And relative dates, with something like this.
(this|next|last|on) (Sat|Sun|Mon|Tues|Wedns|Thurs|Fri)day
Then another for months, and "tomorrow", and anything else you like. It'll get pretty complicated, but you can join them all together like (regexp1|regexp2|regexp3).
The great thing about strtotime is that it will just return false if it doesn't understand, so you don't need to be too exact.
If these aren't necessarily being processed the same day, you can also pass a timestamp from when the original entry was created.
Some things like "at the end of the month" you're going to have to do manually. strtotime reads a lot, but it's not that detailed.