PHP：带有preg_match的正则表达式

Question

I am new to php and learning regular expressions. I am trying to use preg_match to convert a standard time to military time. The data coming in is in the format "September 6, 1991 at 6:23PM." Elsewhere in the code I have already used regular expressions to break the data into an array with elements "Month," "Day," "Year," "Hour," and "Minutes." I am trying to tell the program to look at the data and if it ends in PM add 12 to the "Hour" element. Here is my code:

    if (preg_match("/[A-Za-z0-9,:\s]*[PM]/", $original_data)) {
        $broken_data[$j][3]= $broken_data[$j][3] + 12;
    }

Where $original_data is a string in the format "September 6, 1991 at 6:23PM" and $broken_data is the array described above. What I think the preg_match is doing (and intend for it to do) is return true if there are any number of AZ, az, 0-9, :, commas, or spaces followed by PM. How is this wrong?

Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

You can skip preg_match entirely and use strtotime() and str_replace()

However, the format that you have breaks when you have "at" in the string, and that's why we use str_replace to get rid of it.

// converts to "September 6, 1991 6:23PM"
$time = str_replace(" at ", " ", "September 6, 1991 at 6:23PM"); 
// You will need to change this to the format you want outputted
echo date("M d, Y H:i" , strtotime($time));