PHP date / time question

[Josh]

I am having trouble parsing a time value from the Steam web API. The value is "20160119T185934Z". When I use the date() function below I get a result of "Sat, 22 Aug 1970, 08:08:59". I can see "01-19-2016" in the original value, which is probably the correct date. How do I parse this for displaying in human-readable format?

 

$displaytime = date('D, d M Y, h:m:s', $timestamp);

[xtom]

date() takes a timestamp so don't think that will work. You could probably use substr() three times to extract the 3 parts of the date 2016 01 19 as it looks like it would probably be consistent with the leading zeros on the day/month. Not sure off hand if there is a better way.

 

a quick untested example

$string = "20160119T185934Z";
$year = substr($string,0,4);
$month = substr($string,5,2);
$day = substr($string,7,2);
echo $day."/".$month."/".$year;

[martyj]

There's a couple of ways to do this.

 

Note that date takes in an integer for the second param of a unix timestmap.

 

Easiest but error prone,

 

$displayDate = date($format, strtotime($timestamp))

 

strtotime can be kind of picky.

 

I recommend something like this: http://php.net/manual/en/datetime.createfromformat.php

 

That way you can specify the format of the input.

 

Then call format on the object to display.

[Josh]

Cool, that did it.