Trying to match this regular expression: PHP

Question

EDIT: I am trying to match the year in the string below

   $expression = "BORN ON:</th><td>weekday, Month Day, Year 
hr:min:sec AM timezone</td>"

AM maybe pm , timezone could be pst etc year is always 20-something

I've tried:

$pattern = "~BORN ON:</th><td>\w+(/20\d\d/)\w+</td>~";

to no avail, help is appreciated!

Thanks

Answer 1

you should backslash " / " symbols. and make sure you have leading and trailing slash in your expression eg

$pattern = "~BORN ON:<\/th><td>\w+(\/20\d\d/)\w+<\/td>~";

preg_match("/...../", $where, $results);

secondly, here is updated expression:

preg_match("/BORN ON:<\/th><td>\w, \w [0-9]+, [0-9]+ [0-9]+:[0-9]+:[0-9]+ (AM|PM) \w <\/td>/i", $where, $results);

not tested, but should match your needs. also, enclose parts that you need to appear in results - atm, all date would be found in $results[1] if matched.

---

upd

preg_match("/BORN ON:<\/th><td>(\w, \w [0-9]+, ([0-9]+) [0-9]+:[0-9]+:[0-9]+ (AM|PM) \w) <\/td>/i", $where, $results);

$results[1] now would contain year

Answer 2

Try to get this string separately :

$string_time = "weekday, Month Day, Year hr:min:sec AM timezone" ;
// you use str_replace to get it

then use php builtin function :

$the_time = strtotime($string_time);

now you can manipulate it anyway you want, if that's what you are looking for.

You can use date("...",$string_time) to get it in any format you want. ex:

echo date("Y-m-d",$string_time);

Answer 3

I matched using this in Ruby. Regex is prolly same in PHP. Try it out. Let me know if you have any issues. I would love to help. Good luck! :)

string = "BORN ON:</th><td>weekday, Month Day, Year hr:min:sec AM timezone</td>"
regex = /<\/th><td>([^,]+)\s*,\s*([^ ]+)\s+([^,]+)\s*,\s*([^ ]+)\s+([^:]+):([^:]+):([^ ]+)\s+(AM|PM)([^<]+)<\/td>/i
if regex.match(string)
    puts "match"
    puts "#{$1} is weekday"
    puts "#{$2} is month"
    puts "#{$3} is day"
    puts "#{$4} is year"
    puts "#{$5} is hour"
    puts "#{$6} is minutes"
    puts "#{$7} is seconds"
    puts "#{$8} is Am or Pm"
    puts "#{$9} is timezone"
else
    puts "no match"
end

Answer 4

我得到这个工作：

"~BORN ON:</th><td>\w+, \w+ [0-9]+, ([0-9]+)~";

Answer 5

How about something like this to extract the year?

$strs = array( 
    "BORN ON:</th><td>weekday, Month 05, 2011 hr:min:sec AM timezone</td>",
    "BORN ON:</th><td>Sunday, Jan 05, 2010 hr:min:sec AM timezone</td>",
    "BORN ON:</th><td>Tuesday, 11 05, 2019 hr:min:sec AM timezone</td>"    
);

foreach( $strs as $subject)
    if( preg_match('%BORN ON:</th><td>\w+,\s*\w+\s*\w+,\s*(\d+)\s*%im', $subject, $regs))
        echo $regs[1] . "\n";

Demo