Create a date from a string in PHP

Question

I have a date formatted like this:

2011-15

The first piece is a 4 digit year and the second piece is the day of the year since January 1.

According to php.net docs I should be able to do something like

$date = date_create_from_format('Y-z', '2011-15');
echo $date->format('Y-m-d');

and get the date returned in a more sane value.

This, however, doesn't work at all. It causes php to reset the connection.

Is there a better way to turn "day of the year" into a more usable value (i.e. month and day)

Thanks

What do you mean, reset the connection? You're doing this via a webpage and doing that date stuff crashes PHP? — Marc B
– Marc B, Commented Feb 10, 2011 at 22:22
Yes, I have the DateTime classes installed. I thought I was using 5.3, I'll have to hop on that machine and check. Yes, those simple statements will cause my browser to give me a "connection was reset" error. I have error reporting cranked all the way up so anything else would print out to the screen. — Jim Wharton
– Jim Wharton, Commented Feb 10, 2011 at 23:38

The Dog · Accepted Answer · 2011-02-10 22:46:19Z

2

To accomplish your goal in older versions of php you can use something like the following:

<?php
    $date_string = '2011-15';
    $date_array = preg_split('/-/',$date_string);

    $start_of_year = strtotime("1 January {$date_array[0]}");
    $date = strtotime("+".($date_array[1]-1)." days", $start_of_year);
    echo "$date \n";
    echo date("Y-m-d",$date);
?>

Which outputs: 1295074800 2011-01-15

answered Feb 10, 2011 at 22:46

The Dog

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1 Comment

Jim Wharton Over a year ago

I'll give this a shot. I'm thinking the production server on which this will be deployed is PHP version 5.2.

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