What would be the best approach to finding a date in a freeform text?
- by Matthew DeVos
What would be the best approach to finding a date in a freeform text? A post where a user may place a date in it in several different ways such as:
July 14th & 15th
7/14 & 7/15
7-14 & 7-15
Saturday 14th and Sunday 15th
Saturday July 14th and 15th
and so on. Is regex my best choice for this type of thing with preg_match? I would also like to search if there are two dates, one for a start date and a second for an end date, but in the text I'm searching there may be one date or two.
This is my PHP code so far:
$dates1 = '01-01';
$dates2 = 'July 14th & 15th';
$dates3 = '7/14 & 7/15';
$dates4 = '7-14 & 7-15';
$dates5 = 'Saturday 14th and Sunday 15th';
$dates6 = 'Saturday July 14th and 15th';
$regexes = array(
'/\s(1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|12)\/\d{1,2}/', //finds a date
'/\s(1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|12)-\d{1,2}/', //finds another date
'%\b(0?[1-9]|[12][0-9]|3[01])[- /.](0?[1-9]|1[012])\b%', //finds date format dd-mm or dd.mm
);
foreach($regexes as $regex){
preg_match($regex,$dates,$matches);
}
var_dump($matches);
