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I am trying to parse a logfile, using human readable dates without a year into a timestamp. I have looked over the function strtotime() but haven't had any success with it.

Example time: Apr-26-10:49:36 which is the equiv of "M-j-H:i:s" for the date() function.

Edit: without a year, in my case here..its perfectly fine to assume the year is the current year.

I've created a script to break this down in the past, but it was long and redundant. I was hoping for a more simplified way of doing this. Any help, or pointing in the right direction would be greatly appreciated :D

David Houde
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  • possible duplicate of [strtotime failing on date format](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5133703/strtotime-failing-on-mm-dd-yyyy-hhmm/5133746#5133746) – Gordon Apr 27 '11 at 13:27
  • possible duplicate of [How can I use PHP to parse a date string](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2767324/how-can-i-use-php-to-parse-a-date-string/2767419#2767419) – Gordon Apr 27 '11 at 13:27
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    possible duplicate of possible duplicate – Michael Apr 27 '11 at 15:37

2 Answers2

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If you know the format of the date, you can use strptime to parse it. This returns an array that you can use to determine the arguments for mktime.

Oswald
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  • $test = strptime("Apr-26-10:49:36", "M-j-H:i:s"); returns FALSE. Do you think it's a bad format, or because the year is omitted? Thanks for the help – David Houde Apr 27 '11 at 13:40
  • It's a bad format. Use "%h-%d-%H:%M:%S" as described in the documentation for [`strftime`](http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.strftime.php), not "M-j-H:i:s" as described in the documentation for [`date`](http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.date.php). These two formats can easily be confused, but the documentation page for `strptime` says to use the format of `strftime`. – Oswald Apr 27 '11 at 14:07
  • I'm sorry, that was actually the first thing I tried after your post. I was experimenting afterwards, and pasted the modified code. Thanks for the help – David Houde Apr 27 '11 at 14:23
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Maybe not the prettiest way to do it but it works

The problem why the strtotime function is not working is because the hyphen between the Day and the Hour 26-10.

You can replace the - and then use strtotime.

echo date('Y-m-d H:i:s', strtotime(str_replace('-', ' ', 'Apr-26-10:49:36')));
Khlbrg
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